Magnus to Nurse's Office

@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 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.