Feature Overview: Group Associations

Group associations is a feature that can be enabled by request and may be recommended to handle certain use cases, such as employee and client sharing among offices.

• Group associations overview
• Which features do group associations apply to?
• Configuring group associations
• Feature limitations and considerations

Group associations overview

In AlayaCare, groups serve to connect various entities to one another. The four types of entities that can be assigned to one or more groups are clients, employees, facilities, and suppliers.

Group associations is a related feature that uses groups to control which entities all employees except system administrators can access in AlayaCare. The group that the employee belongs to as well as the position of their group within the group structure determines which clients, employees, facilities, and suppliers the employee can access in the system.

Which features do group associations apply to?

When using group associations, employees will only be able to see information related to entities that are within the scope of the group they are assigned to. You can control employee access to client, employee, facility, or supplier information through group associations for the following AlayaCare modules:

• Clients
  • Overview
  • Demographics
  • Events
  • Care documentation
  • Visit reports
  • Accounting
  • Scheduling
  • Coordination
  • Services

• Employees
  • Overview
  • Demographics
  • Clients
  • Skills & qualifications
  • Forms
  • Schedule
  • Time sheets & premiums
  • Employment

• Facilities

  • Overview

  • Information

  • Skills & qualifications

  • Facility forms

  • Visit reports

  • Scheduling (client and employee)

  • Coordination

  • Services

• Schedules
  • All-client schedule
  • All-employee schedule
  • Workforce management

• Suppliers
  • Overview
  • Information

Group associations can be used to partially control access to the requisition list in supply management. Employees can view the names of clients who fall within the scope of their groups. All requisitions will be visible in clients> supplies management> requisition list regardless of the employee's group. 

Group associations cannot be used to define the scope of employee access to features at the system level that are not directly linked to client, employee, facility, or supplier profiles. For these features, access must be controlled using roles and permissions (ACLs) in settings> roles and permissions. Group associations cannot be applied to the following features:

• Supply management
  • Provider catalogue

• Accounting
  • Billing (for all funder types, including CCAC/LHIN billing, electronic billing, HCP, etc.)
  • Bill-to parties
  • Payments
  • Reconciliation
  • Payroll
  • Accounting exports

• System settings
  • Agency information
  • Locale
  • Form settings
  • Care plan libraries
  • Form context
  • Features
  • Roles and permissions

• Data Exploration

Configuring group associations

If your organization plans to use group associations, your client success team will work closely with you during the configuration process to ensure that the required features are enabled by the AlayaCare engineering team and that any required data migrations are completed successfully. Note that this feature cannot be turned on and off from the interface in production environments.

If you already have data in your production environment, a data script will also need to be run by AlayaCare to ensure that the group associations functionality works correctly.

You are required to test this feature in a UAT environment before enabling it in production. This step is essential for verifying that the group associations functionality will adequately support your organization’s workflows.

⚠️ Once the group associations feature is configured for you, you will no longer have access to the old client groups page under clients. ⚠️

Groups will now be found by navigating to schedules> scheduling settings> groups.

Once the group associations feature has been enabled, the next step is defining your group structure, creating your groups and group associations, and assigning groups to clients, employees, facilities, and suppliers.

Please note that any manual changes to groups and associations should be made by a system administrator during a downtime in your organization’s operations. This precaution will ensure that non-system admin employees are not blocked from accessing the web application or prevented from viewing certain clients, employees, facilities, or suppliers while changes are made to the groups.

Learn more

• How do I create groups, group associations, and assign groups to clients/employees/facilities/suppliers?

Feature limitations and considerations

There are some feature limitations with group associations that are important to understand before enabling the functionality.

Accounting

The scope of group associations does not include accounting processes, meaning that group-based permissions will not apply in the accounting module. This means that if a non-system admin employee navigates to the accounting tab, their view will not be restricted to only accounting information related to the entities that belong to their group or any associated groups. All employees in a role that has the permissions needed to access accounting features will be able to view all entities across groups.

You should not enable any accounting-related permissions for non-system admin employees who should not be able to view accounting information related to entities that are out of the scope of their groups.

Data Exploration

The data exploration module is also not within the scope of group associations. If a non-system admin employee is in a role that has access to data exploration, they will be able to see data across all clients and employees in the system, regardless of group.

You should not enable any data exploration-related permissions for non-system admin employees who should not be able to view data related to clients, employees, facilities, and suppliers that are out of the scope of their groups.

Multi-office configurations

Group associations is to be used as an alternative to a multi-office configuration. Organizations should only enable group associations in a multi-office environment after comprehensive testing. If you wish to enable group associations in a multi-office environment, please note the following:

• An additional column will appear in the groups list in schedules> scheduling settings> groups to display the branch that each group belongs to.
• Groups are to be created and used within the context of a single branch, and not to be associated across branches, or between HQ and sub-branches.