How Can I Best Facilitate the Transition of Health Office Staff from ...

One problem identified in the pilot schools is that health office visits do not transfer withstudents from one school to another school. As a result, a Health Office Visit Report, which is acopy of all health office visits, will transfer with students. Finally, a non-visit tab will be availableto document information regarding a student that is not from a health office visit that would beusually kept in yellow SHRs…this would replace hand-written charting. There is still a great dealof work to be done in order to implement changes for the 2010-2011 school year, but we havemade huge progress and have the support of most school nurses, nurse’s assistants, the HealthCoordinator and our Chief Information Officer.This brings me back to my question: How can I best facilitate the transition of healthoffice staff from written student health records (SHRs) to electronic health records (EHRs)?The Infinite Campus Health services Survey (Appendix II) completed by 29 school nurses and 32nurse’s assistants provides information on staff needs regarding the move to EHRs and trainingpreferences. The survey data reveals several parallels between school nurses and nurse’sassistants’ responses including drop down menu choices, choice of more than one service andhaving a text box available for additional information during a health office visit. A part of theEHR that differed for school nurses and nurse’s assistants is being able to document non-visitinformation. This may be due to school nurse’s documenting this type of information more oftenthan nurse’s assistants in daily practice and in the difference in job roles and responsibilities.Overall, comments from school nurses and nurse’s assistants were positive to “go electronic” inorder to save time and avoid duplication of charting. Several comments indicate that staff preferworking with one system instead of having to go back and forth between IC and Omega andespecially liked using the Contact Log.According the Infinite Campus Health Services Survey data, the training most staffpreferred was to have written directions in a step-by-step format, small group instruction in acomputer lab and instructions on MyMMSD. In addition, the IC Health program areas that moststaff identified as needing more instruction and training is creating and using Ad Hoc Queries andusing Excel. Secondarily, Hearing and Vision Screening and Follow Up were also identified asareas that staff were not as comfortable using and needing more training. The plan is to scheduleIC Health training during the week before the start of school in August 2010 for all health officestaff. I plan to work on IC Health and the training program over the summer to include some