The Evolving Landscape of Campus Health Services

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed college health services, forcing institutions to adapt to new challenges rapidly. Now, as campuses settle into a post-pandemic world, student health centers must navigate a landscape that looks very different from just a few years ago. From the expansion of telehealth to increased demand for mental health services, the expectations of today’s students are shifting.

In this blog, we explore the lasting impact of the pandemic on campus health services and how colleges can stay ahead by embracing new processes and tools.

1. The Rise of Telehealth in College Health Centers

Telehealth, once a supplementary service, is now a core component of college health offerings. Virtual consultations for medical and mental health needs provide convenience and accessibility.

Furthermore, telehealth has become essential for college students, with 71% reporting they use telehealth services, compared to just 54% of the general population, according to a 2024 study. This increased adoption is linked to better health outcomes, with college students more likely to report improvements in their health over the past few years.

How Colleges Can Expand Telehealth Support

• Invest in robust and secure telehealth platforms: Ensure your technology supports video conferencing, secure messaging, and integrating electronic health records.
• Ensure mobile-friendly platforms: Optimize telehealth services for accessibility on smartphones and tablets.
• Utilize social media and campus communication channels: Promote telehealth services through various platforms.
• Partner with student organizations: Collaborate to raise awareness and encourage utilization.

Embracing telehealth allows colleges to expand healthcare access, reduce barriers to care, and support student well-being—ultimately enhancing student success and retention.

2. A Growing Emphasis on Mental and Physical Health Integration

Additionally, integrating mental and physical health services is crucial for providing students with a full picture of their well-being.

For example, Research from Bangor University highlights the strong link between mental health challenges and physical well-being in college students, showing that mental illness is closely tied to fatigue. Persistent anxiety or depression can reduce motivation for healthy habits like exercise, increasing susceptibility to illness.

Thus, by integrating mental and physical health services, institutions can address these interconnected challenges more effectively.

Strategies to Promote Collaborative Care:

• Implement Collaborative Care Models – Foster cooperation between mental health counselors, primary care providers, and wellness staff to ensure a unified approach to student health.
• Provide Staff Training on Stress-Related Physical Health Issues – Offer training for staff to recognize and address the physical symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression in students.
• Promote Campus-Wide Wellness Programs – Develop and encourage programs that support students’ mental and physical well-being, such as stress management workshops and fitness initiatives.

Incorporating a holistic approach not only meets immediate student needs but may also improve long-term health outcomes.

3. Strengthening Immunization and Public Health Preparedness

Maintaining strong immunization programs is vital to prevent outbreaks. Digital solutions like EHRs and VeriVax streamline immunization tracking and compliance, providing a more efficient way to monitor student health records.

Furthermore, colleges can also leverage data analytics to identify gaps in immunization rates and target high-risk groups, further enhancing their preparedness. This not only ensures public health on campus, but also helps institutions stay ahead of potential outbreaks.

How Colleges Can Optimize Immunization Management:

• Implement EHR systems with automated immunization tracking
• Increase awareness through targeted vaccine campaigns
• Establish clear protocols for handling infectious disease outbreaks

Adopting these practices helps colleges safeguard the health of their students and staff, allowing for a more resilient and stable campus environment.

4. Addressing Long COVID and Other Emerging Health Concerns

Long COVID continues to present ongoing challenges for college students. A study conducted at a Saudi Arabian college found that 7% of students are still reporting persistent symptoms.

These health concerns can significantly impact students’ academic performance and overall well-being. As conditions like Long COVID continue to evolve, colleges must develop adaptive strategies to effectively support affected students and ensure their success.

How Colleges Can Support Students With Long Covid:

• Provide specialized care plans that address the unique symptoms of Long COVID
• Partner with local healthcare providers to ensure access to medical care and resources
• Integrate mental health support to help students cope with the emotional toll of persistent symptoms

Implementing targeted support strategies will enable colleges to help students manage the challenges of Long COVID and other emerging health concerns, ensuring their academic success and overall well-being.

5. Enhancing Accessibility and Health Equity

The pandemic highlighted significant healthcare disparities, exposing the barriers many students face when it comes to accessing quality care. Specifically, these disparities include financial limitations, language barriers, and a lack of culturally competent services. To address this, colleges must take the necessary steps to ensure students have access to the care they need.

Actions Colleges Can Take to Support Health Equity:

• Expand low-cost or free health services to ensure accessibility for all students.
• Offer multilingual health resources and culturally competent care to meet diverse needs.
• Increase funding for on-campus health equity initiatives to promote inclusivity.

Taking these steps will allow colleges to break down healthcare barriers and provide every student with the opportunity to thrive.

Key Takeaways

Working in college health requires constant adaptability, a truth highlighted by the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Embracing digital tools like telehealth and EHRs is essential for expanding access and improving efficiency in student health services, while proactive public health measures and robust health education are key to ensuring campus safety.

Furthermore, addressing healthcare disparities and ensuring equitable access to care is a fundamental responsibility, requiring colleges to remain agile and innovative in meeting the evolving needs of students in a post-pandemic world.

If you found this interesting, consider reading: Managing Shared Data Between Health & Counseling Clinics.

This piece was contributed by Mary Kuchenbrod, VP of Data Operations at Arcadia, an analytics platform for data-driven healthcare organizations. To learn how you can deliver faster decisions and better results using advanced healthcare analytics, visit Arcadia’s website.

The amount of healthcare data generated each year is scaling at 47%. Clinics must adapt their traditional data management processes to handle the rapidly increasing volume of patient data.

Due to the sheer scale of healthcare data, advanced approaches and tools are necessary for streamlined data collection, storage, sharing, and analysis. With strong data management, downstream analytic outputs help providers derive meaningful insights for informed decision-making. Overall, the right strategies and technologies drive improved wellness across patient populations.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how smart data management solves healthcare’s greatest data difficulties.

1. Improve Patient Outcomes

Your clinic’s top priority is its patients’ well-being, and smart data management is the way to achieve that. Readily available and accurate data is key to informed decision-making, directly impacting care delivery outcomes.

Effective data management supports clinical decision-making at every touchpoint, including:

• Diagnosis: Clinicians must have access to comprehensive data for a holistic view of a patient’s health needs. Collecting and centralizing real-time data enables providers to develop precise diagnoses and timely intervention plans.
• Treatment: Comprehensive data allows clinicians to design tailored treatment plans or leverage tools that automate treatment plan proposals. For example, Arcadia’s care management software guide explains this technology facilitates informed intervention strategies by streamlining treatment planning, medication management, and other aspects of patient management.
• Follow-up: Effective data management empowers providers to identify patients at risk of complications or long-term conditions to implement proactive care. Data-driven patient communication increases the likelihood that patients adhere to care plans and stay involved in their care journeys.

Takeaway: Implement a system for organizing existing data and supporting patient interactions at each touchpoint. Look for a solution purpose-built for analytics, including predictive analytics to support future touchpoints with proactive care.

2. Enables Data Interoperability

Proper data management ensures that information is easily accessible by the right parties. Clinicians must collaborate to provide whole-person care that addresses all of a patient’s needs, and this is only possible when information is unified under a centralized database.

Cloud-based data storage systems enhance care coordination by facilitating simple and secure data interoperability. The optimal storage solution should allow for:

• Data organization: Online storage solutions aggregate patient records, eliminating the need for chart chasing and providing timely access to critical data.
• Scalable growth: As clinics grow, data volume will inevitably increase. Cloud-based systems can adapt accordingly, accommodating increasing data loads without major infrastructure changes.
• Robust analytics: In addition to simply storing data, an effective solution should support informed decision-making by extracting actionable insights. This allows clinicians to use aggregated EHR data from multiple sources at the point of care, leading them away from reactive medical treatments and toward preventive medicine.

As a result, these systems facilitate:

• Enhanced care collaboration: An organized repository stores all usable healthcare information from EHR solutions, insurance claims, lab databases, and other critical data sources. With organized data, clinicians can seamlessly share and problem-solve through transferable insights.
• Efficient workflows: Readily accessible data enables employees to make the best use of their time. With greater efficiency, clinicians can improve the patient experience by reducing wait times and minimizing record-keeping errors, and clinics can avoid staff burnout caused by hefty task loads.
• Patient engagement and retention: Cleaner file management empowers providers to bridge communication gaps, streamline patient interactions, and deliver personalized care. This fosters patient trust, increasing satisfaction and loyalty to their providers. 

Takeaway: Evaluate your current data storage system to identify any gaps in interoperability. Implement new systems or integrate existing ones to unify information into a central repository and improve care coordination.

3. Enhances Data Integrity

A substantial benefit of strong data management is that it builds trust in your organization’s data. The right precautions ensure clinicians have reliable and accurate patient information, empowering them to make confident care decisions.

After establishing a scalable data storage solution and improving data sharing, clinicians must implement robust measures to ensure data quality remains high over time. A strong portfolio of safety checks should include: 

• Continuous monitoring: Healthcare data changes constantly. The best ongoing practices assume that something will go wrong, flag it when it does, and isolate that data from moving downstream and negatively impacting your operations. As a result, strong data management allows clinicians to address issues before they escalate.
• Disaster recovery and backups: A comprehensive data restoration strategy ensures clinicians can restore critical patient data after a cyberattack or hardware failure. This way, your clinic can continue operations swiftly, minimizing disruptions to your workflows and patient care.
• Root cause analysis: Identifying the underlying causes of data inconsistencies or errors enables care teams to maintain data integrity. Clinics can then ensure the long-term reliability of patient data by preventing recurrence through data standards. 

Takeaway: Focus on quality in your data management approach, creating a system that prioritizes accurate and consistent data entry. Address any existing errors and take proactive steps to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

4. Smart Data Management Requires Strategic Planning

Healthcare organizations must adopt strong data management tools and techniques to set the pace for improved workflows and outcomes. However, the key to effective data governance in healthcare is developing and implementing a well-structured plan for the future.

Work with your team to determine your data management approach and research the tools needed to execute it. With a strategic approach and the right toolkit, your team can improve its efficiency and increase capacity while minimizing risk.

Transitioning to an electronic health records (EHR) system can be daunting for any college health center, especially when faced with staffing changes or time constraints. However, Emory & Henry University’s process was made smoother thanks to Medicat’s robust onboarding support and personalized guidance.

In this blog, you’ll learn how Medicat’s onboarding support empowered Emory & Henry University to overcome challenges and achieve a seamless EHR transition.

The Challenge of Transitioning

Emory & Henry College began their journey to adopt an EHR system to modernize their health center operations, shifting away from paper processes. However, the transition wasn’t without its hurdles.

The college experienced a change in leadership during the EHR transition, as their initial director, who had been instrumental in planning and implementing the system, moved on to a new role. This shift brought in a new director who had to quickly adapt to the learning curve while managing a small team.

Hear Emory & Henry University’s Health Director, Jessica Fain, explain why their clinic chose Medicat in the clip below:

Personalized Onboarding Made the Difference

The Medicat onboarding team provided invaluable support, ensuring the new director felt equipped to take on the challenge. “The onboarding has been invaluable,” Fain said. “Joelle and the team were always available, even during off-hours, to answer questions and provide guidance.”

Medicat’s onboarding approach is tailored to meet the unique needs of each client. Here’s an overview of what the process generally involves:

• Dedicated Support: After officially joining Medicat, clients are assigned an Onboarding Specialist who works closely with them throughout the process. For example, Joelle collaborated with Emory & Henry University, offering one-on-one assistance to set their clinic up for success.
• Kick-Off Call: The implementation begins with a kick-off call that brings together the client’s stakeholders, the Onboarding Specialist, and the Account Executive. During this session, goals are set, expectations are aligned, and a go-live date or gradual launch plan is determined.
• Custom Setup: The Onboarding Specialist handles key initial steps, including setting up the database, incorporating custom branding into the Patient Portal, organizing demographic import requirements, configuring single sign-on, and creating initial user credentials. For Emory & Henry, this included helping their team build templates and add transaction codes tailored to their health center’s workflow.
• Comprehensive Training: Medicat also has an online Help Center which is constantly updated with new information and recorded sessions (more on that later). And concluding the kick-off call, the Onboarding Specialist will typically set up weekly one-hour meetings to help get key team members to feel comfortable with Medicat as quickly as possible.

This structured yet customizable approach ensures every client’s implementation process is seamless and aligned with their specific needs.

Learn more about Medicat’s implementation process in this blog.

Why Onboarding and Customer Support Matter

Selecting the right EHR vendor goes beyond choosing the best technology; it’s about finding a partner who will guide and support your team throughout the implementation process and beyond.

Ensuring a Smooth Start

The onboarding phase is critical to setting the foundation for long-term success. Without strong guidance during this period, health centers may struggle with technical issues, workflow disruptions, or staff frustrations that can derail the implementation process. A vendor with a knowledgeable and responsive onboarding team ensures your staff is empowered to learn the system  and confident in its use from day one.

For Emory & Henry, the personalized attention they received during onboarding was vital in navigating unexpected staff changes. Medicat’s team acted as a true partner, ensuring continuity in the process and equipping the new director with the tools and knowledge to succeed.

Hear directly from Emory & Henry University’s Health Director about their onboarding experience:

Building Long-Term Confidence

A robust customer support team doesn’t stop at go-live; it provides ongoing assistance to address issues, update processes, and adapt the system as your needs evolve. This long-term relationship fosters confidence in the EHR system and helps staff focus on providing high-quality care, rather than troubleshooting technical issues.

Our Support Team is dedicated to ensuring your clinic’s success long after implementation. Our ticketing system allows you to easily log and track support requests, ensuring quick resolutions and minimizing disruptions. Whether it’s a technical question or help navigating new features, our team is just a click away.

We also prepare clients for regular product updates, so you’re always equipped with the latest tools and functionality. Through proactive communication and detailed release notes, your team is ready to take advantage of enhancements without missing a beat.

Moreover, Medicat offers an extensive Help Center, which includes information on upcoming product releases, trainings, and webinars to keep your team informed. Features like the Super User Center, along with comprehensive guides and instructional videos, empower staff to fully utilize the system and enhance their efficiency. With Medicat, you gain not only a powerful EHR, but a partnership committed to your clinic’s continued growth and success.

Choosing the Right Partner

Transitioning to an EHR system is a significant investment, both financially and operationally. Thus, choosing a vendor with exceptional onboarding and customer support, health centers like Emory & Henry can mitigate risks and set their teams up for success.

Whether it’s through personalized training, timely assistance, or ongoing resources, Medicat’s approach demonstrates the value of a partner who prioritizes client success every step of the way.

Curious about how other schools are thriving with Medicat? Explore our library of client stories.