IU, NoMoreClipboard expand IT use to improve student health, wellness
Building on the success of recent student personal health record adoption rates at Indiana University's Bloomington campus, NoMoreClipboard.com and IU on Feb. 4 announced a strategic alliance to develop additional personal health modules in an effort to improve student health and wellness at IU, and to market healthcare information technology solutions to other colleges and universities.
The IU Health Center, above, receives about 70,000 patient visits each yard. About 40 percent of the 2009 IU freshman class created an electronic personal health record facilitated through a partnership between the Health Center and NoMoreClipboard.com.
NoMoreClipboard.com is an online, patient-controlled personal health record management system designed to consolidate a patient's medical information in one convenient and secure location for easy access and use.
As part of the expanded partnership, NoMoreClipboard personal health records (PHR) will be offered to students at additional IU campuses, as well as to traveling student athletes. IU is also working with NoMoreClipboard to develop a college health platform that will appeal to the education market and help NoMoreClipboard promote the IU success story to other colleges and universities.
"Students not only embrace information technology, they expect to conduct business, personal or otherwise, online and have trouble understanding why a health clinic would still capture patient information on paper forms," said Pete Grogg, associate director at the Indiana University Health Center. "Through our alliance with NoMoreClipboard, we are working on a college health platform that includes functionality designed to appeal to college health professionals and the student populations they serve."
IU was one of the first universities in the U.S. to offer a robust PHR solution to students. The online PHR was piloted in February of 2009 and incoming students were encouraged to create a PHR account over the summer. Forty percent of the 2009 freshman class created a PHR prior to arriving on campus, and more than half of those students have since used the PHR to exchange information with the health center.
"The PHR adoption rate at Indiana University clearly demonstrates that college students are ready and willing to manage their health online," said NoMoreClipboard chief marketing officer Jeff Donnell. "Our collaboration is already bearing fruit. Working with the IU Health Center and Hamid Ekbia, associate professor at the IU School of Library and Information Science, we are refining our user interface and considering new functionality based on input from IU students."
IU Health Center encourages students to sign up for a PHR when they schedule appointments online, to complete online intake forms, to request medication refills and soon to view their financial history online. The clinic also encourages students who are studying abroad to complete an online PHR before leaving the country.
The center sees about 70,000 visits per year, or between 400 and 500 patients cycling through each day. Prior to the PHR going live in February 2009, the center had gone live with a patient portal in the fall of 2008 where students could access services such as online scheduling, a service which went live in August 2008. As of last fall, students can now request medication refills online to the Health Center Pharmacy. A financial module is expected to be in place for student use during the Fall 2010 semester that will enable students to access their financial histories (which often contains sensitive medical information) and pay bills from the convenience of their dorm room or apartment.
The PHR enables students to store their contact information, provider list, current and past medications, allergy information, diagnoses, immunization records, and family and personal medical and social histories. Currently, the IU Health Center is working with both NoMoreClipboard.com and its electronic health record vendor to enable the bi-directional exchange of this information between the two systems. "Of course, this will all be done through the control and authorization of the individual student," Grogg said.
Indiana University students at the Bloomington campus can currently create a free personal health record account by visiting the Health Center's Web site (www.indiana.edu/~health/) and clicking on "myHEALTH" to visit the Health Center page on the OneStart portal.
Grogg also noted that the agreement with NoMoreClipboard creates an opportunity for researchers at IU, particularly in the School of Library and Information Sciences, the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, and the School of Informatics and Computing, to become involved in the development of consumer health applications in the areas of wellness, prevention, self-management, chronic disease, and health education. At the same time, such development will create opportunities in user-centered design, human-computer interaction, privacy and security issues, systems integration, databases, and data exchange.
For more information, visit http://www.NoMoreClipboard.com.
