Third-party Medical Records systems

@Brian Gray We are a similar school but less than half your size. We have SNAP and are in the process of moving to Magnus Health. The pricing is now more competitive than when we first looked at them a couple of years ago. They promise tight integration with Blackbaud. By next month I hope to have more details. Our nurse is very excited about the move.

)

@Brian Gray We use Magnus for our health records (prek-12th) and it has worked really well for us. The integration pushes records over nightly and there is an SSO.

I will say, our nurse is very happy with it. Parents get a list of requirements to complete each year and they can upload documents themselves (no more paper records!) There is also an app which is pretty user friendly.

We have not had a lot of technical issues with the software, but support is responsive and helpful when I have had to reach out.

I am also interested in speaking to schools who are using August. We are a 9-12 school of 330 students. We are also currently using Magnus, but I don't like it much.

@Brian Gray did you ever get any information on August schools? I am a counselor at a K12 in Norcorss GA and am exploring this option. I don't know of anything else out there that seems nearly as comprehensive. But, I would love to hear from any actual users -

Beka Gilliard

@Rebekah Gilliard Hi Beka - we used Magnus for a long time, but this year made the switch to August.

@Lauren Henderson Oh, thank you! I feel so lost for answers so I appreciate your help!

@Rebekah Gilliard You're welcome! We have another year with Magnus but are looking to switch over to August.

@Rebekah Gilliard Adding to my reply from long long ago, we did indeed switch to August. We were using inResonance (School Forms Online) and SNAP previously rather than Magnus, though. The integration with Blackbaud is trivial - the student / parent / classes & groups data is synced nightly, as are the student photos. Parents connect via an SSO from Blackbaud. So no additional databases or logins to maintain - yay.

Wrestling the data out of SNAP was a struggle as well - it's more of a reporting system than an exporting one - but if you can get it out, August will work with you to import it. It took a few attempts back and forth for us to get just the right format, but they were patient. Importing allergies and conditions is the trickiest because they are lookup lists in August and just plain text in the imports, so over time you end up converting from one to the other. But when they parents next fill out the forms, they are editing the live data and fixing it themselves anyway.

Management of medications, visits, permissions, immunizations, etc. seems to be working fine. Our psychologists also use it for their visits. It can additionally support coaches and other similar staff if desired.

The forms system is quite powerful. You create a single enrollment packet with all of the possible forms inside, and then use rules to match forms to students based on criteria and assign additional forms based on what the parent selects (like if they indicate an allergy, they will get an additional form for an allergy plan). Not sure how Magnus works, but that's very different from inResonance where you did manual student assignments. And given the criteria, if a student is then new to the system, the overnight sync brings them and their parents into August, and they get automatic assignments to the forms. Exports are either CSV or PDFs, similar to Blackbaud. Running reports can sometimes be slow, that's been one of our few complaints.

I think we're happy with it in the end, although the implementation can feel overwhelming at first. It seems like they are a little short on guidance or just plain guides on how to handle everything when you first start.

@David Gillespie
I appreciate this answer so much. It is quite helpful and I'll pass this along to our admin team as they consider a possible switch. As a counselor who wouldn't need to pull a lot of health records (unless we decide to use the nurse module) I think it seems wonderful - i'm sold. I can see there are certainly things we would need to weigh. Thanks again!