- December 5, 2012
- Jennifer Salerno
More than 15,000 services are delivered annually to metro-Detroit students and community members through the Henry Ford School-Based and Community Health Program. In 1991, its first school based health center opened in Detroit’s Hutchins Middle School. It has grown to include 9 school and community settings across metro Detroit.
Mary Serowoky, a nurse practitioner, is clinic coordinator for the state-funded school based health center at Southwestern High School in Detroit. This center serves adolescents between the ages of 10 and 21.
All adolescents seen in Southwestern’s center complete a risk assessment annually. Serowoky, who’s worked in school-based health for a decade, has used risk assessment tools her entire career. She knew the paper-based, lengthy forms were tedious and difficult for teens to complete — and for medical providers to review.
Implementation “was super-easy,” Serowoky said. Training took 10 minutes. Then, it was a matter of determining where youth would complete the assessment and how providers would access and use it. A medical assistant, care manager, and clinical therapist all use RAAPS data to support the teen patients.
Serowoky says the RAAPS’ electronic features make it a “must have.” Teens complete RAAPS faster, more thoroughly and more honestly than they did the former, longer, paper assessment. Health providers supporting a given teen can access that teen’s results, review results more efficiently, and there’s consistent information across the entire patient population. What’s more, RAAPS’ multilingual capabilities are invaluable to students who, in Southwestern’s case, need Spanish or French versions.
RAAPS produces comprehensive reports that Serowoky uses to evaluate top risk areas. She catalogs behaviors by race and gender to advance the team’s understanding of patients, and she will compare the population to a national peer group using RAAPS data. “We love that this is electronic since we can pull all the reports and we have a database of all the kids. This is really good for us,” Serowoky said.
Read more about Henry Ford Health System and how they put RAAPS into practice by viewing their case study.
Contact us today with questions about how to effectively integrate RAAPS into your practice!