What a Typical Update Costs

In October, a parent emails the health office. Her child’s medication dosage has changed, and she wants to make sure the school has the new information. The nurse picks up the email a few hours later, between clinic visits, updates the record she works from daily, and moves on. The trip binder the athletic trainer carries on overnight events doesn’t get updated because keeping it current whenever something changes isn’t anyone’s official job. Three weeks later, a group heads off campus. The binder has the old dosage, and nothing goes wrong on that trip. There was nothing in the process set up to catch it if something had.

This kind of gap was built into daily operations at Interlochen Center for the Arts, a boarding school in northern Michigan serving roughly 500 students year-round, before they moved to SchoolDoc. About 30 percent of enrolled students take regular medication. Before the switch, students missed doses often enough that it had become a recognized problem, not an occasional exception. There were no automated alerts when a student didn’t appear during their medication window, and the paper-based process the health staff was running had no mechanism for addressing it.

Back in the October scenario: the nurse spent time on administrative work instead of clinical work. The binder with the old dosage created a gap between what the school had on file and what the traveling staff member was relying on. And because the update arrived through email rather than any official intake, there is no timestamped record of when it was received, what specifically changed, or who confirmed it back to the parent. If a question surfaces later about whether the school had current information and acted on it, there is nothing to point to.

How the Work Adds Up

For years, Grier School in Pennsylvania maintained two complete paper records for every enrolled student. One lived in the health center for daily use. The other was kept ready to go to the hospital if a student needed emergency care, which meant keeping both files current across 300 students, updated in parallel whenever anything changed. When a student needed emergency treatment, someone located the backup copy and sent it along.

It was a deliberate workaround for a records setup that couldn’t solve the two-files problem on its own. The cost was distributed across hundreds of small tasks throughout the year, none of which looked expensive in isolation, but all of which took time that could have gone somewhere else. After switching to SchoolDoc, the school’s director of nursing said the system saves a ton of time, cuts the paperwork dramatically, and is easy for staff to use. The two files became one, and the hours that had been going into maintaining both went back into actual clinical work.

What Coverage Actually Requires

Grier’s health center is staffed from 7 AM until 10:30 PM. That window runs across multiple nurses and multiple shifts, serving a student population that lives on campus full time. Whoever is covering the evening isn’t necessarily the person who has been following a particular student’s case. If the current version of that student’s record lives in the primary nurse’s email or in her head, whoever covers the later shift doesn’t know what’s changed in the last few weeks without calling her.

Corey Hill, Director of Health Services at Interlochen, said it plainly: when a student has to go to the emergency room, having instant access to their full medical history is what the job requires. What he was describing is the operating condition of a health office that runs across multiple staff members and doesn’t have the option of waiting for the right person to be available. What any authorized staff member needs is the ability to pull a complete, current record without having to track down whoever worked the previous shift.

What Usually Comes Up in the Budget Meeting

Doesn’t our SIS handle this?

Student information systems are built around enrollment data. They generally weren’t designed to track a medication change that arrived by email after enrollment closed, or to give a coach access to current health information before an off-campus event. Automated alerts for missed medication windows aren’t a standard feature either. For schools where health records officially live in the SIS, updates that arrive after September tend to live somewhere else in practice. Jared Gugnitz, IT Project Manager at Interlochen, said what made SchoolDoc’s implementation workable was the API connection: student and parent data moves into SchoolDoc in real time, with no manual batch processing required. With the API in place, student and parent data in SchoolDoc stays current automatically, without anyone processing it by hand.

We have a process that works. Is this the right time to change it?

Schools that have made this switch tend to do it in the summer, for practical reasons. Staff have time to learn the system before it matters, and records can be set up and tested before the first day of classes. Grier’s director of nursing said staff were ready after one or two training sessions. Interlochen’s IT team said the API meant no manual data processing was required once the connection was in place. The concern that a new system will cost more in setup than it returns in the first year tends to resolve once the implementation is described in concrete terms.

See How Other Schools Made the Change

Interlochen and Grier each published accounts of their SchoolDoc implementation. Interlochen’s covers medication administration, incident tracking, and the API integration across a program that includes both a year-round boarding school and a residential summer camp serving thousands of additional students. Grier’s focuses on transitioning away from duplicate paper records and what onboarding looked like for a nursing staff with varying comfort levels with new technology.

Read the Interlochen case study →
Read the Grief School case study →