Digitizing school health records: A quick guide to getting started
This January, schools will continue needing to monitor and manage the COVID-19 vaccination and overall health statuses for millions of students. Traditionally, this would involve a massive amount of paperwork — but with electronic health records, it doesn’t have to.
Research shows that paperless school health records can greatly simplify repetitive tasks like retrieving and reviewing student health records, while electronic signatures can streamline a wide variety of document processes for students and school staff alike. In fact, institutions are finding that digital health records accelerate policy enrollment, protect student privacy, ensure regulatory compliance, and expedite authorized release of student info in case of emergencies.
What’s more, many health professionals now consider electronic health records an essential tool for schools. So, let’s take a closer look at all these benefits of going paperless, and see what immediate steps your school can take toward a paperless health record system.
Digitizing health data makes it easier to collect, organize and store student records
Storing student health records digitally provides a wide range of advantages over traditional paper filing systems — and those advantages become clear straight from the submission stage. Schools that send out health record documents digitally and collect verified electronic signatures rather than ink ones can reduce turnaround times from weeks to mere hours. This dramatic reduction in processing time can free up admin staff to focus on more urgent tasks, while saving your school from having to hire expensive seasonal data-entry workers.
What’s more, digital health records are much easier to organize than hard copies. An electronic database serves as a single centralized repository for all student health data, which can be accessed from any authorized device anywhere on campus — or even remotely, through a secure mobile connection. Plus, instead of requiring staff members to file and search records by hand, an electronic health record system will automatically keep student health data organized and make it easy for admins to search for specific records with just a few keystrokes.
In terms of physical space, digital documents also take up much less room than paper ones. Rather than requiring rooms full of bulky filing cabinets, electronic health records can be kept on a local server or stored in the cloud — helping lower your school’s storage costs and freeing up filing areas to be used for office space or other more immediate needs. That means your school can easily justify the initial investment in going paperless, since digital health-record transformation will quickly pay for itself.
Electronic health records protect students’ privacy and support regulatory compliance
The benefits of going paperless extend far beyond these practical upsides. Electronic health records also provide much tighter security than paper-based filing systems, since secured digital files can only be accessed by authorized personnel. Within an electronic record system, it’s even possible to specify permission levels for particular types of information — enabling administrators to verify that a certain student carries insurance, for example, while protecting students’ personally identifying information (and other private or sensitive details) from being viewed by unauthorized parties.
In fact, such precise and consistent security policies offer more than just peace of mind, they help ensure your school’s compliance with a wide range of record management regulations, such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). As a growing number of states crack down on violations of these regulations, digital health records can keep your school in the clear, by providing full FERPA, HIPAA and COPPA compliance on an automated basis.
And when it’s time to manage vaccination record updates (as your school is probably doing this January), digital forms can save your admin staff a lot of unnecessary headaches. For example, paperless documents are easy to electronically share with students and family members, who can make any necessary changes in real time, then finalize those edits with a digital signature. As a result, changes often take just a few minutes per document — enabling a small team of admin staff to easily manage thousands of health insurance enrollment processes in parallel.
Switching to electronic student health records can start with just a few simple steps.
Although transitioning to digital health records might sound like a complex technical process, the truth is that it’s easy to get started by making some simple modifications to your school’s existing record system. For example, many admins begin by converting paper forms to fillable PDFs using Adobe Scan, then collecting electronic signatures on those docs with Adobe Acrobat Sign. Online document signing alone can save your school thousands of labor-hours per month, while laying the groundwork for end-to-end paperless processes throughout your institution's administrative infrastructure.
As your school’s admin staff becomes more comfortable with digital documents, you will want to organize the information you collect into a centralized and compliant database. To help with this transition, Acrobat makes it easy to extract specified data from a completed form, and add that information to a spreadsheet or database of your choice. You can then provide specific levels of access to users with various authorization levels or display up-to-date record summaries to admin staff members who don’t have permission to view personal or sensitive student details — all without requiring administrators to manually collect and authorize each requested record.
And when it comes to student privacy, Adobe builds in best-in-class security throughout the entire lifecycle of each document, applying controls to ensure that all collected health information is stored in compliance with data regulations like COPPA, FERPA and HIPAA. Adobe’s identity management services take this security even further, by providing fine-grained authorization management linked to specific employee records and devices — ensuring that the right employees are able to access the information they need to do their jobs, while preventing unauthorized parties from seeing any details they shouldn’t have access to.
This robust security and flexibility make Adobe Acrobat products easy to integrate with a wide range of applications, from office suites to database systems to productivity apps. That means when it’s time to update student health records, you will find it much simpler to synchronize your local data with information from other sources and destinations, such as state-level immunization databases and community health records. Along the way, you will find that paperless processes and pre-filled forms help prevent annoyances like record duplication, while saving teams from the hassle and expense of annual data entry.
By helping collect and update student health data, verifying form submissions with e-signatures, and protecting students’ privacy to ensure regulatory compliance, electronic health records can make this time of year easier for your admin staff in a wide variety of ways. From speed, to efficiency, to security and confidentiality, paperless health records provide numerous benefits over traditional paper ones — and with the help of Adobe software, the transition to fully paperless processes is easier and more cost-effective than ever. Check out Adobe’s free on-demand webinar, Digitizing Health Records (and more) withAdobe Sign, for a step-by-step guide to getting started.
And to find out more about how to go paperless, and streamline your school’s transformation toward digital health records, visit Adobe’s Education Resource Hub for free guides — as well as case studies from institutions that have discovered the benefits of digital transformation for themselves.