Shepherd University Student Health Center EHR

The Student Health Center is a division of the Office of Student Affairs at Shepherd University. The mission of the center is to support the personal growth and development of the students by offering and integrated approach to address the physical and emotional well-being of those needing its services. It is the goal of Shepherd University’s Student Health Services to provide guidance to its students in their pursuit of good health. They believe it is better to be an educated health care consumer and an active member of the health care team, than a passive recipient of medical services.

The Student Health Center offers basic level medical care of common ailments such as cough, colds, bronchitis, sore throats, earaches, mono, strept, poison ivy, bee stings, sprains, and strains. In addition, the following services are provided when warranted and fees may be required:

PPD tuberculin testing
Blood pressure monitoring
Weight monitoring
Loan of medical equipment, such as crutches or heating pads
West Virginia Family Planning Services, by appointment
Testing and treatment of some sexually transmitted diseases
Community referrals for more extensive medical needs
Rape counseling
Pregnancy testing and counseling
Throat cultures for strep infections
Emergency Contraception Pills
Self Care Unit

The Student Health Center must maintain health records on thousands of students. Unfortunately, all of the records and notes have been kept on paper. They did not have any sort of electronic health record (EHR) system in place and had no immediate hope to obtain such a system except through the Medicaid transformation grant.

After a thorough analysis of requirements, KRM configured and installed RPMS, the EHR solution selected, along with modifications required to interface an Open Source product called Clearhealth to be utilized for patient registration. This process involved modifying the basic EHR application and developing an HL7 interface to feed data into the EHR from the Patient Registration GUI. Additionally, this project involved management, configuration and training for the basic functionality and templates for use within the EHR.

By moving from a paper-based system to the use of an electronic health record (EHR) system, the clinic hoped to operate more efficiently, improve quality of care, and better address patient safety by reducing patient error rates by using automated systems that incorporate clinical alerts, decision support and e-prescribing tools.

This innovative initiative involved implementing the free and open source healthcare software suite known as the Open VistA system. This system was based on the award winning VistA system developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for use at all VA healthcare facilities across the country. This public domain software system has since been adopted by the Department of Defense, Indian Health Service, and several state health departments. In addition it is also being adopted by healthcare facilities overseas including Egypt, Mexico, Finland, Germany, Samoa, and other countries.

KRM Associates provides program management and technical support services to the Director and Program Manager of the Shepherd University Student Health Center.

This project reflects a collaborative public and private sector initiative to implement an electronic health record (EHR) system in the Student Health Center at Shepherd University. It involves the participation of the following partners: