Preparing for a Student Health Record System Implementation and Online Health Form Rollout. By Amber Hawkins, Account Executive CareFlow Electronic Student Health Records
After selecting the right online student health record (SHR) for your school, it is time to shift your attention to the implementation process, and integration with your student information system (SIS). Managing change is crucial during this process. Identify all stakeholders and communicate with them, explaining what the changes will mean for them. Communication is key to planning your rollout, and will help you adhere to deadlines and milestones.
The first step is to perform a thorough analysis of current processes. What are the health center workflows? What information does your staff need from the SIS? How do athletic trainers operate? What do chaperones or coaches need when taking students off campus? Make sure your team takes these things into consideration in order to configure the software to meet your needs.
After analyzing your current workflow, the second step is integration with your SIS. Integration with Senior Systems means that certain types of data (depending on your school’s needs, usually student contact information at the very least) will be brought into your new student health record system so you have real-time, synced information between your student health records and your SIS.
Your school’s IT department and your Senior Systems project manager will work together to implement the integration, leveraging Senior Systems Web Services. In addition, unique to CareFlow is our ability to connect parents to our online health form through our proprietary single sign-on method (SSO).
Once your school is up and running and the integration is complete, training should be provided. It is important to realize that a lot of schools have staff who may need training outside of the SHR program if they are not proficient or comfortable using a computer. Tips on browser functionality, Excel, and iPads may be useful. Most users learn best through hands-on, real-world examples. I recommend onsite training with the trainer shadowing the staff and back-entering the information into the SHR after seeing the students (and as time allows). This will speed up the transition. As with any new software, you may feel that using the SHR is slowing you down at first, but once you and your staff become proficient and gain confidence, you will see an increase in effectiveness as well as time-savings.
As enrollment time rolls around, you will begin to design your health forms. There may be a catalog for you to select from. You should also be able to completely mimic your current forms if you choose to do so; however, many of the forms you use are likely used across other schools.
Setting goals is an important part of this process. You should expect to reduce communications with parents and reduce printing and the use of paper. You could also set a parent/guardian satisfaction goal.
To achieve these goals we recommend the following process:
- Build the health forms.
- Review the health forms.
- Test the forms internally.
- Revise the health forms if needed.
- Work with the communications team to determine the communication process for parents (a.k.a. automated reminders).
- Create a deadline for completion.
- Determine your reporting needs for when you come back to school.
- Open the health form up to a small parent group willing to provide feedback.
- Revise the health forms again if needed.
- Release the health forms to the general population.
Finally, we recommend that the health center staff come back to school a little earlier than usual the first year. After all, this is a new process for you, and you want to make sure you are comfortable when the normal rush begins. In year two, you will find it is much easier, not only for you, but also for parents.
Senior Systems would like to thank CareFlow for their collaboration and partnership.
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