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texting students their medical appointments

Texting Students: Best Practices from Our Recent Webinar

When the University of Oregon moved an appointment reminder text from one hour out to three hours out, students started canceling in time for the clinic to refill those slots. A small change produced real, meaningful results.

That story was one of many shared during our recent webinar on texting best practices for campus clinics. Medicat’s Chief Evangelist Ruth Patten and CEO Lauren Pragoff were joined by Erika Boyers, Senior Assistant Director of Patient Services and Health Information Management at the University of Oregon.

Here’s a recap of what we covered, plus a free AI prompt guide to help you write better texts!

Why Texting Students Works

Students rarely put their phones down. Emails pile up and get buried, but a text shows up as a quick notification they can read and act on in seconds. And to be honest, that’s true for all of us, not just students.

Texting is already part of daily life. We get texts about flight changes, dentist appointments, and deliveries. Most of those texts include a link to take the next step. Campus clinics can use the same pattern for:

  • Appointment reminders for medical, counseling, and wellness visits
  • Immunization compliance nudges tied to campus deadlines
  • Event outreach, like mass flu and COVID vaccine clinics
  • Portal alerts when a secure message, lab result, or visit summary is ready

Keep It to 160 Characters

Medicat’s texting uses the “short code” model with a 160-character limit built into the system. Longer messages can split into several texts depending on the carrier. Spaces, numbers, and emojis all count, so every character needs to earn its place.

Use AI to Write Warmer, Clearer Texts

Fitting a helpful, friendly message into 160 characters is hard. That’s where AI can help. Lauren’s advice: the more specific your prompt, the better your result.

Tell the AI tool exactly what you need. Try asking it to:

  • Rewrite for warmth and clarity: “Your appt is at 10 am tomorrow. Don’t be late” can become something kinder.
  • Lower the reading level: Many news outlets write for easy reading. You should too.
  • Ease anxiety: Some visits feel stressful. The right words can help.
  • Skip internal or clinical slang: Ruth noted that campus shorthand can confuse new and international students.

Here’s a sample prompt from the session: “Rewrite this to sound warm and student-friendly. I work at a college health center, and I’m texting a college student. Keep it under 160 characters.”

Want more prompts like these? Download our free AI prompt guide and put them to work on your next round of texts.

Protect Privacy and Get Consent Right

In our live poll, managing opt-in and consent tied for the top challenge, along with making sure students read their texts. Both matter, and both start with trust.

Keep Health Details Out of the Text

A text should never reveal protected health information. Ruth reminded attendees that notifications can pop up on a lock screen where anyone might see them. Avoid:

  • The clinic’s full name or the provider’s name
  • Test results, even negative ones
  • Anything that hints at why the student is visiting

Instead, keep the text generic and link to the secure patient portal. At the University of Oregon, texts name the clinic type (like “immunization clinic”) but not the campus health center. Every text points students back to the portal for details.

Know Your School’s Opt-in Path

Start with your institution’s privacy and communication policy. If enrollment paperwork already allows texting and you manage immunization compliance in Medicat, you may be able to opt in the full student body. If not, a mass opt-in isn’t appropriate.

Ruth also shared that scheduling an appointment is generally treated as implied consent for that clinic to text the student. Check with your compliance team to confirm what applies on your campus. ACHA is a helpful resource for peer guidance on student health operations.

In Medicat, students can opt in or out through forms at each visit, a standing portal form, or a checkbox in their portal profile. They can also text STOP at any time to stop receiving text messages from your clinic.

How University of Oregon Reworked Reminder Timing

During the 2023-24 school year, Oregon sent appointment reminders 24 hours and one hour before each visit. Students weren’t canceling in time, and many arrived late. So, Erika’s team tested a new texting cadence. Here’s what they tried:

Reminder Why it works

24 hours before

Puts the visit on the student’s radar

3 hours before

Leaves time to cancel without a fee, plus the clinic can fill that slot

20 minutes before

Prompts students to make their way to the clinic and arrive early to check in

The result: more timely cancellations and more students arriving within the check-in window. In fact, Oregon saw a 170.5% increase in timely cancellations over three years after beginning this experiment!

Beyond appointment reminders

Oregon and other schools now use texting students for more than visits. Erika shared a few ideas that other campuses can borrow:

  • Referral recalls: A text nudge led more students to follow up with outside providers.
  • TB screening follow-ups: High-risk results trigger a text pointing to next steps in the student portal.
  • Student input: Erika works with her student health advisory board to test AI-drafted messages to increase survey completion rates.

One more tip: Oregon asked Medicat to protect the cell phone field, so nightly data feeds don’t overwrite the phone numbers staff update in person. Any Medicat customer can request this for particular fields through a support ticket.

Key Takeaways

Texting students works best when every message is short, private, and tied to one clear action. Timing matters too, as Oregon’s 24-hour, 3-hour, and 20-minute schedule shows.

Ready to start or sharpen your approach to texting students? Download our free AI prompt guide and request a live demo with our team.

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ICD-10 and CPT Code Suggestions

AI-Powered ICD-10 and CPT Code Suggestions Save Precious Time

A 2024 study covered by the American Medical Association found that primary care physicians spend an average of 36 minutes in the EHR for every 30-minute visit. Much of that time goes to work that happens after the student leaves the room. Coding is one of the biggest parts of it.

Note Agent in MedicatOne offers ICD-10 and CPT code suggestions based on the visit itself. Providers spend less time searching through codes and more time with students.

Why Coding Is a Hidden Time Drain on Campus

College health clinics see waves of demand. Flu season, midterms, and final exams often result in demand peaks! After each visit, a provider still has to turn the conversation they had with the student into the right diagnosis and procedure codes.

That step may seem small, but it adds up over a full clinic day. It often means searching code sets, remembering the right level of detail, and checking that each code lands in the right part of the note. Some common pain points:

  • Time pressure: coding pushes documentation into lunch breaks or end of the day
  • Missed detail: under stress, it’s easy to capture the main complaint and leave out related diagnoses
  • Inconsistent data: when codes vary from provider to provider, patterns in student health visit types and demand are harder to see. For clinic directors and VPSAs, consistently coded data helps surface what students need and make the case for adding additional resources

How Note Agent Suggests ICD-10 and CPT Codes

Note Agent listens to the visit (with the student’s consent) and drafts the clinical note. Once the note is generated, the Coding tab fills with suggested codes. Both ICD-10 and CPT codes appear when they apply.

The provider stays in control the whole time. Nothing gets added to the chart until the provider chooses it. Here’s how the workflow goes:

  1. Review the suggestions: Look over the list of ICD-10 and CPT code suggestions in the Coding tab.
  2. Check what fits: Use the checkboxes to select codes matching your clinical judgment. You can also select all.
  3. Submit each set: Submit ICD-10 codes to the Diagnosis section and CPT codes to the Plan section. Each set is sent separately.
  4. Confirm the result: A pop-up tells you whether each code was added, or if it’s already in the note.

The process takes seconds, not minutes. It also cuts down on retyping since the codes go straight into the note’s building blocks.

See the Reasoning Behind Every Diagnosis Code

AI tools earn trust when you can see how they reach their answers. That’s why each ICD-10 suggestion includes a Show Evidence option. One click shows why Note Agent suggested each code based on the visit recording.

This helps providers make quick, confident decisions. If the evidence matches what happened in the visit, select the code. If it doesn’t, leave it unchecked and move on.

Example: A Midterm Headache, Coded in Minutes

Picture a student who comes to the health center with a persistent headache during midterms. They mention long nights of studying, poor sleep, extra caffeine intake, and hours spent consecutively on their laptop and phone. The provider focuses on the student, not on typing, while Note Agent records the conversation.

After the note is generated, the Coding tab suggests several options. These include tension-type headache (G44.209), stress due to work schedule (Z56.3), and sleep deprivation (Z72.820). A CPT code for an established patient office visit (99213) appears.

The provider clicks Show Evidence on the stress code. It notes that the headache is linked to stress during midterms, a work-related stressor for students. The provider selects the codes that fit, submits them, and reviews the final note before locking it.

The result is a fuller clinical picture. Sleep and stress factors that might have been skipped in a rush are now part of the record. That supports better follow-up care and clearer trend data across campus.

Counseling and wellness centers can benefit too. When a note type is set up with Note Agent, counselors can review suggested codes after a session instead of starting from scratch.

Key Takeaways

Coding shouldn’t be the reason your providers stay late. ICD-10 and CPT code suggestions in Note Agent turn the visit conversation into codes that providers can review, check, and submit in a few clicks. Show Evidence keeps every decision clear, and providers always make the final call.

To see how Note Agent could fit (and even improve) your clinic’s workflow, request a demo.

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What Sets Medicat Apart

What Sets Medicat Apart

One Record, One EHR:

What Sets Medicat Apart

Most campus health leaders aren’t shopping for software; they’re trying to close gaps between systems never built to talk to each other. Medical over here, counseling over there, immunization compliance in a spreadsheet, accommodations in another.

Every disconnected system increases the risk of a student falling through the cracks. That’s the problem MedicatOne was built to solve. And here’s what makes it different from other college-specific EHRs.

It’s One Platform, Not Four Bolted Together

Medicat is one of the only college-focused EHRs that unifies medical, counseling, immunizations, and accessibility on a single student record. Not four products with an integration layer.

For a student, that means accessing care feels like walking through one door instead of four. For your staff, it means a counselor and a nurse practitioner are working with the same information when caring for a student.

Many vendors in the EHR space are point solutions that do one job well. Medicat is the consolidation play, and on a campus where student well-being touches every department, that consolidation is the whole game.

Modern Architecture, not a Legacy System

Medicat is cloud-hosted and web-based. There’s no fat client to install on every machine, no on-prem server for your IT team to babysit, no VPN gymnastics to see a record from the counseling center.

Campuses can’t afford the risk of running their sensitive student data on locally installed, client-backed, on-prem servers, an architecture designed for a different era of campus IT. If your current platform requires a local install and a server in a closet, you already know the upkeep (and security risk) that adds up over time.

Security That’s Actually Certified

Medicat is SOC 2, Type II certified. For an EHR provider, that’s not a nice-to-have; it’s essential. When you’re the one deciding where sensitive student data lives, “we take security seriously” means nothing if standardized audits and reviews don’t back up that claim.

Built for Students, Connected to the Clinic

Students live on their phones. MedicatOne gives them a full student portal where they can schedule appointments, complete forms, upload immunization records, and reach the clinic in one place.

Text message appointment reminders go out automatically, which is the simplest lever there is for cutting no-shows. Some EHRs leave students without a comprehensive student portal, so your front desk stays on the phone doing what the software should be doing.

Reporting and Benchmarking, Built In

MedicatOne has robust reporting built in, so you can pull utilization, immunization compliance, and diagnosis data without exporting to a spreadsheet and rebuilding each report by hand.

For counseling teams, MedicatOne supports the CCMH Standard Data Set, so your center’s outcomes line up with the national mental health benchmarking that CCMH members rely on. You can see how your students compare to peers across the country, using data you’re already collecting.

31+ Years of Supporting College Campuses

Medicat has spent 31+ years building for college health and counseling clinics. That focus shows up across our large, experienced support team, who know clinical workflows like the back of their hands.

The people behind our product are known names in the college health and counseling community. When you submit a support ticket or call our team,

In fact, nearly 25% of Medicat employees come from a background in clinical care or student health operations. They’ve run a front desk during immunization season, sat in on a counseling intake, and closed out end-of-year clinic reports in May. So, when you call our team, you’re talking to people who have done your job, not just supported the software that does it.

AI That Saves Real Hours, at a Price That Makes Sense

Medicat offers two AI-powered tools, both priced to be predictable and accessible. You pay a flat license fee, so you know the cost up front and can budget for it. Many AI products bill by usage instead, which means the price can climb significantly the more your team leans on them.

Here’s a bit more about each of our AI-powered tools:

  • ICM Agent automates immunization review. What used to take staff hours of manual document checking now happens in seconds. During compliance season, that’s the difference between a major backlog and a free Friday afternoon.
  • Note Agent handles clinical documentation and coding using the power of ambient listening technology. Get time back for your clinicians, at a fraction of the cost of traditional scribing technology.

Built for How Campuses Actually Buy

Not every clinic needs every bell and whistle on day one. Medicat’s pricing is modular, so a counseling or medical team can start where the need is most urgent, prove the ROI, and expand their use of Medicat’s tools as budget and services grow. You don’t have to buy everything to get immense value from MedicatOne.

Onboarding and Training Opportunities

You’re not expected to set up and learn a whole new EHR system alone. Onboarding is configured according to your institution’s needs and is led by one of our Customer Onboarding Specialists. Our vast library of educational content and regular training events help set you and your team up for success.

Plus, when you implement MedicatOne, you’re joining a network of 500+ clinics across higher ed that also use our tools. That peer network is often the source of some of the best ideas for maximizing the value you get out of MedicatOne.

Here’s how the platforms line up on the capabilities campus teams ask about most:

Capacity Medicat Titanium PyraMED Point and Click
Web-based and cloud-hosted Yes No Hybrid Yes
SOC 2 certified security Yes No Yes Yes
Comprehensive student portal Yes No Yes Yes
SIS interfaces supported Yes No Yes Yes
Text message appointment reminders Yes No Yes Yes
Robust built-in reporting tools Yes Limited Limited Yes
Business Intelligence report building Yes No No No
Medical + counseling + immunizations
+ accessibility on one record/platform
Yes No Yes Yes
AI-powered immunization review tool Yes No No No
AI-powered ambient listening tool Yes No No Yes
Custom onboarding and configuration Yes No Yes Yes
Large, experienced & responsive support team Yes Limited Limited Limited
On-site consulting Yes No No No

Competitor data sourced from publicly available sources.

The Bottom Line

If you’re treating student well-being as one connected experience, your technology should too. One modern record, securely hosted, built by a team that has done nothing but serve college health and counseling for three decades, and trusted by campuses of all shapes and sizes. That’s the difference.

We’d love to show you how MedicatOne works. To see our integrated EHR platform in action, reach out to our team.

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EHR Software

How Our Education Resources Maximize Your EHR Value

Buying great software is only the beginning. Research shows that customers who receive post-sale education are 20-30% more likely to adopt a product fully, and 86% say training makes them more likely to stay loyal. At Medicat, we believe your team deserves reliable and thoughtful support long after go-live.

That’s why ongoing training sits at the heart of how we partner with campuses. From articles and product walkthroughs to live sessions with real Medicat experts, we build resources that help your clinic turn features into outcomes.

Why We Invest in Education, Not Just Software

A powerful EHR is only as valuable as your team’s ability to use it. When staff feel confident in a system, they spend less time troubleshooting and more time with students. That confidence does not happen by accident. It’s built through intentional, ongoing education.

Education and training also protect the investment your institution has already made. Unfortunately, turnover is common, and new hires need to get up to speed quickly. Strong educational resources keep knowledge from walking out the door.
 
For campus and clinic leaders, this matters at a strategic level. Better-trained teams mean smoother operations, stronger compliance, and measurable improvements in student care quality.

Self-Paced Learning and Enablement

Every campus works on its own schedule, so we create resources your team can access anytime. These materials meet staff where they are, whether they’re onboarding a new coordinator or exploring an advanced feature for the first time. Our self-paced Help Center is designed to be clear, practical, and easy to search. We focus on real workflows your clinic uses every day, not abstract feature lists.

Resources clinics use regularly include:

  • How-to articles that walk through specific tasks step by step, from patient intake to secure messaging, to immunization compliance tracking.
  • Product walkthroughs that show exactly where to click and why, so staff can follow along in their own environment.
  • Short video tutorials that make it easy to learn a new workflow in minutes rather than hours.
  • Release notes that explain new features in plain language, so nothing gets missed.
  • Webinar recordings that let staff revisit live sessions on demand, whenever it fits their schedule.
  • Biweekly product tip emails enable continued discovery and better efficiency.

Clearly, education doesn’t stop after onboarding at Medicat. It follows our clients through the rhythm of the academic year. Our End of Year Wrap-Up Guide, for example, walks clinic admins through a smooth, stress-free closing each summer, while our Super User Prep Packet gets key staff ready to hit the ground running when the fall semester begins.

These helpful resources ensure our clients feel supported no matter where they are in their Medicat journey. You can explore many of these materials in our Help Center, which we update regularly as our product evolves.

Live Training That Connects People to Answers

Written guides are powerful, but sometimes your team needs a real conversation. That is why we complement our library with live, human-led sessions throughout the year. These sessions give staff space to ask questions, share challenges, and learn from peers on other campuses.

Additionally, our live software trainings include structured onboarding for new clients and role-based sessions to teach specific workflows. We also host refreshers before busy seasons of the year, so your team feels ready when appointment volume spikes.

Live training formats we offer include:

  • Guided onboarding to help new clinics configure and launch with confidence.
  • Role-specific workshops for front-desk staff, clinicians, counselors, and administrators.
  • Seasonal webinars covering topics like immunization season, telehealth trends, and end-of-year reporting tips.
  • Office hours during which clients can bring topic-specific questions and know they’ll walk away with answers.

Support Tickets Provide Another Opportunity for Learning

Not all learning happens from a webinar or a help article. Some of the most valuable teaching moments come from a routine support ticket. That’s because this kind of learning is timely — it happens at the exact moment the client needs it, not weeks later in a training session they may or may not remember.

Our team is trained to “forward resolve” wherever they can, so a simple request doesn’t turn into a second ticket later. Rather than simply fixing the issue, our support agents will walk the person through the fix themselves, so they leave the conversation able to do it on their own next time.

That might mean pausing to explain why a setting works the way it does, or handing back the keyboard so a superuser can enter the change themselves with guidance rather than watching it happen. It’s a small shift, but it adds up. Fewer repeat tickets, more confident clients, and a support relationship that builds capability instead of dependency.

One client put it well: “The support agent was so helpful! She walked me through what I needed to do and had me enter the information myself with minimal guidance so I could learn how to do it on my own. I feel confident I can handle this myself in the future.”

Tailored Value for Every Clinic

Education only works when it speaks to the people using the system. We design our educational resources so each audience finds clear, relevant value.
 
For college health centers, that might mean mastering patient intake, streamlining immunization compliance, or launching telehealth visits. For counseling clinics, it often means smoother scheduling, easier secure messaging, and confident documentation of mental health appointments.
 
For VPSAs and other campus leaders, the payoff is operational. When teams use our college health solutions to their full potential, institutions see better data accuracy, healthier compliance rates, and stronger student outcomes. According to the American College Health Association, well-supported campus health and counseling services play a direct role in student retention and success.

Where We’re Headed Next

We’re proud of how far our education program has come, and we’re not standing still. The next chapter of our roadmap brings more learning directly into MedicatOne itself, so guidance shows up right when and where your team needs it rather than in a separate tab or help article.

We already do this well through our Help Center, live sessions, and everyday support moments, but we see real room to continue growing. Bringing support inside MedicatOne is all in service of the same goal we’ve always had: making confident, capable use of our EHR the natural default for every person on your team.

Key Takeaways

Great software delivers its full value only when the people behind it feel confident and supported. Medicat builds articles, product walkthroughs, videos, and live sessions so your team can turn our tools into better student care. Whether you lead a health center, a counseling clinic, or student affairs as a whole, ongoing education is how you protect your investment and improve student outcomes year after year.

Ready to get more value out of Medicat? Explore our Help Center to see all that’s available to your team today.

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User Permissions within EHR Software

Why User Permissions Matter Within EHR Software

Since 2009, more than one billion healthcare records have been exposed in U.S. data breaches. On a busy college campus, dozens of people may touch a single student’s health record, front-desk staff, nurses, counselors, and student workers alike. User permissions decide who sees what, and that decision protects your students, your staff, and your clinic.

What User Permissions Actually Do

User permissions are the rules that control access inside your EHR software. They set what each staff member can view, edit, or share. Think of them as digital keys, cut to fit each person’s job.

A medical assistant may need to check in patients and update vitals. A counselor needs to view counseling notes, but not immunization records. Clear access rules make sure each person only reaches the tools and information their role requires.

This approach is often called role-based access control. Instead of managing access individually for each user, you assign a “permission group,” and the role carries the right permissions. It keeps setup simple and consistent as your team grows.

Protecting Student Privacy and Staying Compliant

College health and counseling records are sensitive by nature. Students share details about mental health, sexual health, and chronic conditions. They trust that this information stays private

Well-designed user permissions support that sense of trust directly. They limit access to the people who truly need it, which is the heart of the HIPAA minimum necessary standard. Fewer eyes on a record means fewer chances for a breach.

Permissions also help you maintain any necessary separation between medical and counseling records. Many campuses keep therapy notes separate from primary care files. Your EHR should allow for the flexibility necessary to protect counseling notes while still coordinating care across clinics when appropriate.

For VPSAs, this is more than a technical detail. A single privacy incident can damage student confidence and invite regulatory scrutiny. Thoughtful access controls lower that risk across the whole division. You can read more about how EHRs safeguard student privacy.

Fewer Errors and Cleaner Workflows

Access rules do not only guard privacy. They also make daily work smoother and more accurate. When staff see only the screens they use, the EHR system feels less cluttered.

Consider a few everyday examples on campus:

  • A student worker checks in patients but cannot open sensitive clinical notes.
  • A front-desk clerk schedules appointments without editing diagnoses.
  • A billing specialist views CPT codes without changing other chart data.
  • A counselor documents sessions without touching medical prescriptions.

Each of these guardrails prevents an accidental edit in the wrong place. That means fewer corrections later and cleaner records overall. Good permission settings quietly reduce the small mistakes that add up over a semester.

Supporting Accountability and Audits

Higher education clinics face regular reviews from auditors and leadership. You may need to show exactly who accessed a record and when. User permissions, paired with audit logs, make that easy to prove.

Because each person signs in under their own account, activity ties back to a real user. If a question arises, you can trace the history with confidence. This transparency protects both students and the staff doing the work.

Clear roles also simplify onboarding and offboarding. When a new nurse joins your clinic, you can assign them a specific set of permissions to ensure they’re accessing the right areas of the EHR platform.

MedicatOne also has group-based permissions, which allow you to define permissions for groups like “Compliance Specialist,” or “Triage Nurse,” or “Front Desk” that have a stock set of permissions. Then you can still customize at the individual level as needed. These are just some of the permission-focused features that clinic leaders value most.

Building Permissions That Fit Your Campus

Every campus health and counseling clinic operates uniquely. Your permission structure should reflect how your teams actually work together. Start by mapping each role to the tasks it truly performs. Here are a few practical steps to guide the process:

  1. List every role in your clinic, from providers to student staff.
  2. Match each role to the minimum access it needs to do the job.
  3. Review permissions at the start of each semester, since roles, responsibilities, and staff change often.
  4. Compare settings across medical and counseling teams based on your clinic’s integration philosophy and policies.

Key Takeaways

User permissions are a quiet but powerful part of any campus EHR software. They protect student privacy, support HIPAA compliance, reduce errors, and make audits far less stressful. For clinic leaders and VPSAs, they turn a complex system into one that is safe and easy to manage.

To see how flexible, role-based access can work on your campus, schedule time to meet with our team.

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Clinic integration

Your Clinic Can Be ‘Integrated’ and Still Not Work Together

Insights from Medicat’s Chief Customer Officer, Amy Smith

Right before the American College Health Association Annual Conference, Medicat hosted a session in Denver with health and counseling leaders from campuses across the country. One line kept coming back, phrased differently by different people, but always the same idea underneath: health and counseling clinics can be “integrated” on paper and still not function as one team.

That gap is worth unpacking: what it means, where campuses actually stand today, and what it takes to close it.

What our clients told us

We asked our clients a simple question: Where does your school fall on the path toward integration? The topline: 62% are integrated or actively working toward it. That splits into 32% fully integrated today and 30% partially integrated and actively moving toward it.

The remaining 38% aren’t there yet, and they don’t all look alike: 15% are not integrated but interested. 13% are not integrated and unsure about the value. 10% are not integrated and don’t see the value.

Clinic Integration Infographic

A few things stand out once you sit with that data. Integrated care, once an edge case, is now the majority experience. Any conversation about the future of campus health and counseling should start from the assumption that most schools are already moving in this direction.

We imagine the 15% who are interested and exploring if integration is worth doing are looking for a clear, low-risk path: how do you sequence the work, what does the data infrastructure need to look like, and what have peer schools learned along the way? For some schools, they may be constrained by bandwidth. Others may be concerned about autonomy.

Counseling teams in particular are often concerned about protecting the confidentiality of sensitive conversations. Done well, integration should answer that concern rather than override it — with explicit, agreed rules about what moves between medical and counseling records and what stays sealed. For other schools, implementing an integrated and collaborative model may raise legitimate questions about staff time before the integration pays off.

What “integrated” truly means

It’s tempting to treat integration as a binary. A school either is embracing integrated care, or it isn’t. But the room in Denver made something clear: two schools can claim integration and be describing completely different realities.

For one school, “integrated” might mean medical and counseling are co-located physically or connected electronically, and not much else. For another, it means more deliberate collaboration — shared records, shared treatment planning, warm handoffs, a care team working from a single picture of the student.

Same word. Different worlds.

National research backs up what we heard from clients: co-location is real, and it’s growing. But it isn’t the same thing as collaborative care, and having providers under one roof doesn’t automatically produce collaboration. It’s entirely possible to merge two departments, put them in the same building, and still end up with two parallel operations — different EHR systems, different treatment philosophies, referrals that go out but don’t come back with any real follow-up.

There’s a useful way to think about why: structure is the skeleton of integration — org chart, shared records, financial model, the workflows that dictate what happens when a student needs both sides of care. Relationship is the muscle — it’s what actually moves things day to day, but muscle can’t hold a shape on its own. The skeleton is also required.

A school can have great relationships between clinic leaders and still fail at integration if there’s no defined process for a warm handoff, no shared record forcing visibility, no accountability for what happens after a referral goes out. Relationship without structure is fragile: it depends on a couple of people who happen to work well together, and it collapses the moment either of them leaves.

So when we ask a campus “where are you on integration?” the real follow-up is integrated in what sense? A school that reports being “fully integrated” because medical and counseling report to the same director, share a building, and use one EHR may be in a completely different place than a school that’s integrated on the org chart but still running two disconnected workflows underneath. Integrated, yes. But not necessarily delivering collaborative care.

The bigger picture

The same tension shows up in the national conversation, too. Behavioral health integration into primary care has been described by leaders in the field as one of the most significant growth areas in psychology and primary care generally, with a striking gap still in place. A large share of primary care providers nationally still don’t have a behavioral health professional on their care team at all, even as awareness of the model’s benefits has expanded.

Integration is increasingly understood not as a nice-to-have, but as one of the more promising responses to our nationwide capacity problem: catching concerns earlier, in the medical visit, before they become a mental health crisis.

National data on colocation also confirms what our clients are telling us: physical colocation of medical and behavioral health providers is expanding, but it’s happening unevenly. It’s much more common in larger, urban, better-resourced settings, and still rare in smaller or rural practices, which are often the ones that could benefit from it most.

That maps almost exactly onto the segment of our own survey respondents that selected “not integrated, unsure about the value.” It’s worth asking whether resourcing, not philosophy, is the real barrier for a meaningful share of that group. If it is, the answer isn’t a harder pitch on the value of integration — it’s a lower-cost, lower-lift path into it. That reframes the “unsure” group almost entirely: not skeptics who need convincing, but under-resourced teams still looking for a way in.

Where this leaves us

As we think about how to support the schools moving through this journey, the more precise question to ask isn’t just “are you integrated?” It’s “do your providers share a record, share a plan, and actually collaborate about the student in front of them?”

That’s the standard worth building toward, and it’s the standard we want our platform to make easier to achieve, not just easier to claim.

If you would like some consultation on starting the journey toward collaborative care, please reach out. We can talk about Medicat as a platform built for integrated health and connect you with the schools already thriving within a collaborative model.

FYI: This data is based on a recent Medicat client survey (n=238) and conversations with client health and counseling leaders during the 2026 ACHA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.


About the Author: Amy Smith is the Chief Customer Officer at Medicat, the electronic health record platform purpose-built for university health and counseling centers. She leads the teams responsible for customer success, support, and partnership, and serves as the internal advocate for the directors and clinical staff who run campus health centers every day. Her work is grounded in real conversations with those teams: what they carry, what they need, and what too often goes unrecognized.

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EHR Deployment Timeline

Thinking About a New EHR

Thinking About a New EHR? Pull Up Your Calendar!

If your college health or counseling clinic is thinking about switching to a new EHR, here’s the hard truth most teams learn too late: the software decision itself is rarely what derails a launch. The timeline is.

Vendor demos, security reviews, and procurement cycles can all take longer than anyone plans for. Plus, your go-live date isn’t entirely yours; the academic calendar’s constraints heavily influence it.

The smartest way you and your clinic can approach a switch to a new EHR is to deliberately work backward from the date you’d ideally like to “go live” on the new software.

That’s exactly what our interactive decision & implementation timeline is built to do: you set a target go-live date, and every upstream deadline calculates itself.

Map Two Timelines, Not Just One

Most clinics think about implementation as the whole project. It’s really two distinct phases.

1. The decision timeline (everything before the contract is signed):

  • Internal needs assessment and stakeholder alignment (IT, administration, clinical, and finance all have a say)
  • Vendor demos and reference checks
  • IT and security review
  • Procurement, legal, and budget approval

This phase is almost always underestimated.  Security and procurement reviews at a college run on separate clocks, not parallel ones, and each can take weeks alone. Simply plug your desired (or necessary) go-live date into the tool and it back-calculates your contract-signature deadline — the real “decide by” date if you want to launch on time.

2. The implementation timeline (everything after the contract is signed):

  • Project kickoff and workstream assignments
  • Discovery, configuration, integrations, and data migration
  • Training and user-acceptance testing
  • Finally, go-live day!

Our Decision Tool lets you toggle between a Standard implementation (single-clinic, smaller campus) and an Enterprise implementation (multi-clinic, complex integrations, larger enrollment) so the estimate more closely matches your school’s reality.

EHR Decision Timeline for deployment

Why “As Soon As Possible” Actually Matters

Every week you spend deciding is a week borrowed from building, implementing, and training.

If your target go-live date is next August and procurement alone eats two months, the window to evaluate and sign is much narrower. Seeing that laid out — in a List view or a Gantt chart — turns a vague “we should look into this” into concrete internal deadlines you can hold yourself and your colleagues accountable to.

The clinics that launch smoothly aren’t the fastest decision-makers. They’re the ones who confronted the real timeline early and started counting backward instead of forward.

Run your own dates, share the link with your IT and procurement partners, and get everyone anchored to the same calendar before evaluation even begins.

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First-year Student Wellness

Navigating New Beginnings: Fostering First-Year Success through Student Wellness

Navigating New Beginnings

Fostering First-Year Success through Wellness

The transition to college life can be an overwhelming experience for many first-year students. With new responsibilities, academic challenges, and social pressures, it’s crucial for colleges to provide support systems that help students navigate and succeed. This blog explores various strategies that college leaders can employ to support first-year student success through wellness.

Continue reading to learn how your campus can foster a positive experience for first-year students and increase retention rates.

Promoting Wellness and Self-Care for First-Year Students

Adjusting to college life can be both exciting and stressful for first-year students. To help ease the transition, colleges can encourage wellness and self-care through simple, accessible practices. This might include offering workshops on stress management, mindfulness, or ways to handle challenges in healthy, effective ways.

In addition to workshops, colleges can create designated wellness spaces on campus where students can take breaks, meditate, or practice relaxation techniques. Peer support programs or wellness ambassadors can also play a role in promoting self-care by providing students with relatable guidance and encouragement. Additionally, colleges can offer resources like wellness apps or access to online self-care tools, making it easy for students to integrate healthy habits into their daily routines. Encouraging students to prioritize their well-being early on can lead to long-term benefits, helping them not only manage stress but also improve their overall academic performance and mental health.

Making Students Aware of the Health Center

Amid the whirlwind of classes, assignments, and campus activities, many students might not realize all the resources available to them—especially the health center, which is crucial for their well-being.

Campus health centers do more than treat illnesses; they promote self-care and help students build resilience. For many first-year students, it’s the first time they’ve had to make their own healthcare appointments, which can feel daunting. Colleges can make this process easier by ensuring the health center is well-known, approachable, and accessible. This can include creating clear, student-friendly materials that explain how to access services, what to expect during a visit, and the types of care offered, such as routine checkups, mental health services, and sexual health support.

Along with outreach efforts, health centers can partner with other departments to embed information into orientation programs, student handbooks, and campus tours. Social media, emails, texts, and push notifications can also help raise awareness. Having health center staff engage in events or set up booths during club fairs or wellness days can further build familiarity and reduce any apprehension students might feel about seeking care. Normalizing visits to the health center can help students feel more comfortable accessing the care they need for a successful college experience.

Increasing Counseling Center Awareness

Having access to mental health support is key for the transition to college life. That’s why making sure students know about campus counseling center services is so important.

In addition to promoting counseling services through emails, campus announcements, and orientation sessions, colleges can use social media to reach students more effectively. Sharing mental health tips, anonymous student testimonials, and reminders about counseling resources can help reduce the stigma around seeking help. Hosting informal meet-and-greets with counselors can also make services feel more approachable.

Training faculty, staff, and resident assistants to spot signs of mental health struggles ensures that students get support even if they don’t actively seek it. Furthermore, peer support programs and mental health ambassadors can also play a role in spreading awareness. Thus, by making counseling services more visible and accessible, colleges help students feel supported and more willing to seek the help they need.

Bringing Awareness to Available Resources

Colleges offer a wide range of resources to help first-year students succeed both academically and personally. For example, libraries, career development offices, group exercise classes, and nutritionists all play a role in supporting students throughout their college journey. However, simply introducing these resources once is not enough. Therefore, colleges must consistently promote them through different channels to ensure students remain aware and can take full advantage of what’s available.

Additionally, colleges can increase awareness by organizing workshops, information sessions, and events that highlight these resources. They can also develop online platforms where students can easily access support and guidance. Moreover, by creating opportunities for students to connect through activities like club fairs, cultural festivals, and student-led discussions, colleges not only provide academic tools but also foster a sense of community and personal growth. This, in turn, helps students build friendships, explore new interests, and feel more integrated into campus life.

Key Takeaways

Inarguably, starting college can be tough on first-year students. This is why creating a campus where students feel supported and have easy access to help is essential for making a difference in their lives. Encouraging students to get involved in clubs and activities can also help foster community among students. Moreover, ensuring that students have access to health and counseling services gives them the tools they need to handle whatever comes their way. Combining these strategies can result in more supportive environments for first-year college students.

Need help connecting students with the right resources on your campus? Check out these expert insights.

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MedicatOne

3 New MedicatOne Features Supporting Campus Care

The right tools can help your team provide better care. Our second MedicatOne product release of 2026 introduces three features (amongst many others!) built to save your team time and keep the focus on student care.

This release reflects the needs and preferences of student health providers, counselors, and wellness professionals. Below is a closer look at Uncharted Notes, Note Search, and Note Collaboration, and why each new feature matters for your clinic.

Uncharted Notes: Capture Important Information Outside the Chart

Not every meaningful interaction fits neatly into a student’s medical record. An uncharted note could be used to document a student calling the counseling center with a concern about a roommate, or a report from campus security, for example.

These interactions often live in someone’s memory or a sticky note, making them easy to lose or forget. Uncharted Notes gives your staff a fast, structured way to record these moments without documenting a formal clinical encounter.

This matters because context drives good care. When a counselor or clinician can see the full picture, including the informal touchpoints, they make better decisions and students feel more supported. For clinic and campus leadership, it also means fewer details walk out the door when a staff member leaves.

It’s important to understand that Uncharted Notes are different from Notes of Concern. Uncharted notes do not exist in the student’s chart, whereas Notes of Concerns do.

Note Search: Spot Patterns Across Your Notes

The new Note Search page in the Activity menu lets you build filtered lists of notes in seconds, making it a powerful tool for quality control and operational review. Results can be printed or exported as a CSV.

A few examples of what you can pull:

  • Every patient with an influenza-like illness diagnosis who also had a rapid strep test
  • Every psychiatry note with a depression diagnosis where a specific medication was prescribed
  • Every in-progress note, so you can nudge providers to lock them

These examples are just a starting point. With flexible filters, Note Search gives clinic administrators the detail they need to quickly surface—and act on—trends in student care and clinic operations.

Note Collaboration: Better Care Is a Team Effort

Student care rarely involves just one person. A student will often interact with a medical assistant, nurse, and/or provider during a single appointment.

Note Collaboration lets authorized team members contribute to different sections of a note at the same time, so that documentation can be completed more efficiently.

If a user is granted permission to collaborate on certain Note Types, they can type into one section of the note while their colleague is updating another section of the note. An example of where this would be helpful is if a nurse is documenting results of a point-of-care test, while the doctor is documenting their examination findings.

Users can see in real-time who is documenting in each section of the note. Once all users have completed their documentation, the note can be locked as usual.

Key Takeaways

Our second MedicatOne product update of 2026 is about giving campus health and wellness teams tools that fit how they actually work.

Uncharted Notes capture non-clinical interactions outside of the student’s chart. Note Search leverages filters across clinical notes to quickly surface trends and inform decision-making. And finally, Note Collaboration helps your team complete notes quicker.

Together, these features, along with many others that are a part of this release, will save precious time and strengthen the student experience.

To see these features in action, request a demo with a member of our team.

Additionally, Medicat clients can explore the full product release notes in the Help Center to access further details about all product releases and new features.

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Agentic AI

How Medicat Is Building AI That Gives Time Back

Meet the Agents: How Medicat Is Building AI That Gives Time Back

Insights from Ruth Patten, Medicat’s Chief Evangelist

Campus health and counseling teams didn’t get into this work to review paperwork or type up notes. They did it to care for students.

Yet every year, more of their day disappears into administrative work  — verifying immunization records manually, chasing down lab results, or charting hours after the visit is over.

That’s the problem Medicat’s AI agents were built to solve. And it’s why we’re not thinking about these agents as one-off features. We’re building a collection of purpose-built agents, each designed to take a specific, time-consuming task off your team’s plate — starting with the two available today, ICM Agent and Note Agent. And more are on the way!

Why “Agents,” and Why More Than One

An agent is artificial intelligence (AI) put to work on a real job that a member of your staff would otherwise do manually. Agents are not chatbots bolted onto your EHR. Each Medicat agent is trained on a distinct campus health workflow, built directly into MedicatOne, and held to the same security and compliance standards as the rest of the platform.

The way we’re leveraging AI within MedicatOne is highly intentional. Campus health and counseling clinic workflow is made up of many different repetitive tasks, and no single tool solves all of them well.

Specialized agents allow your team to tackle those tasks efficiently and thoroughly. This gives your clinic a consistent, safe, and reliable way to adopt AI, as humans remain in control of the student record and your team gets more time to focus on care.

ICM Agent: Immunization Compliance in Seconds

Immunization compliance review is exactly the kind of work an agent should own. It’s high-volume, seasonal, detail-heavy, and pulls skilled staff away from students for hours at a time.

ICM Agent verifies student-uploaded immunization records against your institution’s requirements. It reviews the documentation that students upload to the portal and flags anything it can’t verify, processing a record in roughly 30 seconds rather than the minutes of manual review it takes each person.

It even reads records submitted in 98+ non-English languages, which makes verifying international student documentation far less of a bottleneck.

During implementation, you configure ICM Agent to know your school’s specific requirements, including how waivers should be handled, so it checks for the same things your staff would. As always, your staff can review the ICM Agent’s work and override any compliance status fields as needed.

The result: your team stops doing the grunt work of compliance, remains in control, and spends that time working on more impactful projects over the summer months.

ICM Agent

Note Agent: Documentation That Writes Itself

Clinical documentation is the other great time sink, and it’s often the reason providers feel more like scribes than clinicians.

Note Agent uses ambient listening technology to turn a provider–patient conversation into a draft clinical note, delivered straight into the MedicatOne EHR.

The impact is that providers spend less time typing (during and after appointments) and more time actually present with the student in front of them. Onboarding is minimal; most providers can start quickly with about 30 minutes of training.

Crucially, the provider stays in charge. Note Agent produces a draft, never a final record. Then the provider reviews, edits, and approves every note before it enters the student’s chart. And patients decide whether to use ambient listening at all; they can decline to use this tool during any visit.

Note Agent

What Comes Next

ICM Agent and Note Agent are the first two members of a growing family, not the whole story. As we identify more of the repetitive, time-draining tasks that keep campus health and counseling teams from student care, we’ll build agents to take them on, each held to the same standard of purpose-built design, human oversight, and security-first architecture.

The goal never changes: give your staff more time to deliver care and build genuine connections with students. The agents are just a tool to help your clinic get there.

Curious how agents can help your clinic? Schedule a demo to see ICM Agent and/or Note Agent in action!


About the Author: Ruth is the Chief Evangelist at Medicat, the electronic health record platform built specifically for college and university health and counseling centers. She spends her time connecting the college health community, championing the people and institutions doing important work in the field and helping peers learn from one another across campuses. Her focus is working with our clients and connecting the dots: the shared challenges, the generosity between colleagues, and the ideas that travel best when they move from one center to the next.

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