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Magnus to Nurse's Office

Michelle Newell

We are a school of about 1500 students with 3 nurses. We are investigating switching from Magnus Health to just using BB's health section. Can anyone help answer some questions from a nurse's perspective? This feels like a very daunting task! Our biggest concerns are medication management (daily meds, OTC permissions, and med counts and expiration dates), parent notification of clinic visits, and immunization records management in (GA, we are audited using the actual immunization registry form which has an expiration date on it - so that is the main way we track).

Thank you for any help you are willing to give!

-Michelle

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Jess Moxsky

@Michelle Newell we have considered the same switch, but found that the Blackbaud Nurse's Office just does not give us enough of the functionality we rely on with Magnus. Primarily, you mentioned needing to track a specific external form - you can have parents upload documents using Medical forms, but tracking and reporting get a little weird. I'm not sure the BB Nurse's Office is really a viable replacement for something as full-featured as Magnus Health at this point, but I'd love to hear how other schools are making use of the features that are currently available!

Shannon Krise

@Michelle Newell given the size of your school and your need to track a specific form, I'm not sure anything I say here will be helpful to you, but I did for several years decide that paying for a medical system was not worth the cost to us, so thought I would share. It's hard to summarize some of this, so I'm happy to chat if you have specific questions about what worked / didn't work. We are a PS-8 school with only 360 students and one nurse with other responsibilities.

Med counts and expiration dates are an issue. We do not track those in blackbaud and I believe our nurse keeps them in a spreadsheet.
There is not a direct way to send parent notification of visits. The only option we were able to come up with is to send an official note after entering the visit information.
OTC permissions we collect in a school form. You can turn the results of the form into a medication import file to list the OTC medications on the student's record with an “as needed” frequency and start and end dates to limit permissions to the current school year; we collect the permission form each summer. I would have been happy also to give our nurse access so that she could pull up the form for each student, but our nurse prefers to keep a list of approved medications by student (created from this form export) outside of Blackbaud.
Vaccines are the one that I find really time consuming. It sounds like our requirements are quite different than yours though. There are three pieces to this for me:
- The biggest issue is entering vaccination information. We list each vaccine we need to track, and I enter the dates received manually when I receive the immunization record for new students, rising K students, and rising 7th grade students. For us this means entering approximately 60-80 new records each year. The updates for older students don't take much time. I have employed extra data entry help with this over the summer in the past.
- Since I have all the individual vaccination dates listed in the system, I am able to use medical lists to pretty quickly show me students missing specific immunization requirements by filtering on grade level, vaccinations, and missing/completed status.
- We collect the immunization record through a medical form upload which allows me to access the actual form from the medical record (BUT see next item). This form is part of a student checklist, so I've found it pretty easy to track the forms. I update the checklist step status if there is any issue to be resolved with the immunization record. Using a checklist also allows me to mark the step “completed” if I receive a form not through the upload.
The obvious problem here is that you (the school) cannot upload the immunization form to the student's medical record, so if the parent has an upload issue or turns in a physical form, it either will not appear in the medical area, and you'd have to leave a note indicating where to find the file in Core, or you would need to get creative. (It is possible to upload a file when entering an allergy or condition, so theoretically, you could create a “condition” type for the form so that you could upload a file, but this would create a number of other potential issues to work around.)
We have historically included religious exemptions as an optional “vaccine," but this creates some awkwardness for my lists. If I were continuing to do this, I would probably switch to borrowing one of the Medical summary checkboxes that we don't use to indicate the exemption, or creating a custom field for it so that I could filter exempt students out of my report lists.

Perhaps most unhelpfully to you, although I could not justify medical software to save me time in tracking immunizations, we did decide to use August Schools next year for it's counseling module. Since we were doing that, I jumped at the chance to include the medical module as well to spare me entering all of these immunizations manually, and help our nurse out with the other issues above.

Sorry - Tried to edit this down, but it is still very long!

Michelle Newell

@Shannon Krise
This is super helpful… a few questions in follow up

Are the Medical Summary Checkboxes customizable or do you just know that using “insurance card on file” for example means that they have a vaccine exemption on file? I've thought about using this sections for OTC med authorizations IF we could edit those areas, but I don't know if that's possible.

Have you ever run into issues with families not being able to submit their medical form? I had issues with about 30 families when I used BB about 6 years ago and their help desk couldn't help me figure it out because of confidentiality, so I'm not sure if that still pops up anymore.

For immunizations do you use the section in the nurse's area or a different area of Blackbaud? If you use the nurse's area, can it be formatted to allow a manual date to be entered or does it just populate todays date (ours currently does this)? If we could enter the expiration date of the form here, it would save a TON of time. Well, if we could run a report from this info, which I assume we could?

We did just decide to try using Official Notes to notify parents of clinic visits, but are researching if there are any legal issues regarding confidentiality doing it this way (vs having a parent log in to view the note… is that possible?).

I did chat with customer support and asked these questions and more yesterday. They answered No to my question about parent notifications and then shut the chat down! So …. working through all my questions! And I so appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions. This is exactly what I need!

Have a great day!

-Michelle

Michelle Newell

@Shannon Krise Oh, one other thing I wonder if you've been able to work around…

Every medical condition viewable by teachers generates a “medical alert” - that should be a checkbox option because every student will have a “medical alert” whether it is for seasonal allergies or for a life threatening food allergy, not helping teachers to see at a glance the true medical alerts they should be aware of.

Shannon Krise

@Michelle Newell Some good questions, but I'm not sure I have all the answers:

I have not been able to find a way to customize the summary checkboxes. That would certainly help make them more useful to me, but possibly can't be done because they are tied to specific things in Blackbaud (so if you relabelled them, and then produced a form with the field related to them on it, that might lead to confusion.) One other option might be to create a custom admin field as a yes/no checkbox. I did this to record when we had confirmed proof of ID for a while. It worked well for that and is easy to report on. It would be accessible to a nurse in the Medical area, but would appear on the Contact Card tab instead of the Medical tab, and I don't think you could include it on a Medical list.
I have had some parents struggle with the upload, but it's mostly an issue of technical understanding on their end when we have problems. It works well for the vast majority, but the most common issue is that you can only upload a single document, so parents trying to upload multiple separate pages only end up including the first page. I have just let them send me the rest by email. I suppose I could then combine them all into a single pdf and send it back for them to upload if I needed it to come in on that form.
The official note is something that exists in the database behind login security. There is a notification email related to the note that you can customize. So, the notification email could just mention that the note exists with instructions on how to access it, and then parents would need to log in to read the actual note for details.
I do use the nurses area for immunizations, although I actually prefer entering them on the Medical tab of the Academics view. When you check the box, it fills in today's date as a default, but you can then edit the date.
Regarding using an “immunization form” condition or allergy - Yes - these kinds of duct tape solutions can be problematic. The medical alert would be a concern. I haven't made any attempt to do this, so it would require some testing, but you can choose who to share the information with on the allergy or condition, so possibly you could deselect teachers on that condition and then it would not appear on an alert.

Let me know if I missed anything!

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

@Michelle Newell We use BB's nurse's office. To add to the excellent comments that others noted already:

It is easy to bulk upload medical info into the BB nurse's office once you set up your system and map the fields correctly. Can you pull your data from Magnus?
Immunization would be tracked in nurse's office as it is medical information. When entering vax info, you can certainly pick your date.
As @Shannon Krise noted, our parents, too, struggle with making a multi-page pdf prior to uploading. We have given them how-to videos (iPhone Notes is our friend!). Also, we encourage parents to use short, simple file names with no special characters.