What is a Cohort:

In medical record systems, a cohort typically refers to a grouping of patients who share a specific characteristic(s)  in their medical records. For instance, patients may be grouped in OpenMRS by their age group, medical history, types of medications taken, location of care or even by relationships among the patients. This feature enables easy management of different patient or client groups.

Why Use Cohorts in mUzima:

mUzima supports the cohort feature by enabling retrieval of cohort lists from OpenMRS onto the mobile platform, and allowing retrieval of patient lists for selected cohorts.

• Different users take care of different populations of patients. Cohorts allow users to only see the patient populations relevant to them.
• A mobile device has limited storage capacity, as such, it is advisable to only have only needed patients’ data downloaded on the device.
• Use of cohorts ensure efficient use of network bandwidth and data plans.

Selecting Cohorts in mUzima:

Cohorts can be set as part of a SetUp configuration, or selected manually. In the figure below, All shows all cohorts that are configured in OpenMRS and available for downloading on the device. Downloaded cohorts on mUzima show up under Synched.