ePACT supports public, private, and even outdoor schools in North America. Clients like Columbia College Chicago in Illinois, and Pacific Spirit School in BC benefit from a tool that helps staff eliminate many of the paper forms they use to collect medical and emergency contact information from students. Here are five reasons why schools use ePACT:

Eliminate the Annual Paperwork Process

Every year, schools are required to collect a multitude of information to support students day-to-day and in an emergency, and that usually means lots of paper emergency forms. In fact, schools across North America send students home in the first week of the school year with a stack of paper forms that include requests for emergency contact information, pick up details, health and medical information, and more. This process is a challenge for faculty to administer – from compiling packets of forms for students to take home, to getting them back from families as early in the school year as possible (and before an emergency occurs), staff spend the first few weeks of the academic year simply managing paper forms.

With ePACT, schools can collect the information they need for students in a single, online record, eliminating much of the manual process required to do so on paper. Families fill out their information in ePACT, including specific medical information like allergies, or specialized care needs, and include emergency contact and pick up information, before submitting it back to the school in just a few moments. Staff can view outstanding requests at a glance, and send reminders to families with a single click.

Protect Student Information

One of the biggest issues with paper forms is that they are unsecured. There’s no way to protect the, often private and sensitive, information written on them, and they’re easily lost, misplaced, or visible to unauthorized individuals. Copies of forms are made for field trips or offsite access (originals are often kept in an administrative office for safekeeping), and kept in heavy binders or file folders, which are also impossible to secure.

ePACT provides families with a secure, online record that they own and control access to. Families decide who to share their account with, which ensures that only authorized faculty can see information for students they’re responsible for. ePACT is a HIPAA- (United States) and FIPPA-compliant (Canada) system, specifically designed to protect health information collected from families.

ePACT uses a secure socket layer (SSL) connection, providing a 256-bit encryption to keep the information confidential as it’s sent over the internet. In fact, ePACT meets the same security standards as online banks, so schools can be confident that, once in ePACT, information is safe, secure, and protected from unauthorized access.

Improve Quality of Information

Families in North America fill out more than 9,000,000 paper forms each year for schools, sports associations, and community programs. With so many forms requested by a multitude of organizations, parents may find themselves spending hours hand-writing the same information over and over. This means handwriting gets messy and hard-to-read, or information is missed entirely, which can compromise the level of care that schools are able to provide to students during school hours.

With ePACT, everything is collected and submitted digitally, and records are standardized into an easy-to-read PDF format so that there’s no issue with illegible or incomplete information. If a school is required to have paper forms, faculty can easily print ePACT forms, which are easy to sort and read through if necessary.

Families fill out their information once and share details across any of the organizations they’re connected to – they can only do so once they’ve completed all mandatory fields on their record, making it impossible for critical information to be left out. And when families need to update or change information, they can do so at any time, which eliminates the concern about outdated paper forms – staff receive updates in real time, so that they always have the most accurate student information to hand.

Access Information Anytime, Anywhere

Whether a class is heading out on a field trip, or there’s been an evacuation to the local community center, faculty may have to access student information on paper forms, which can take valuable time, especially in an emergency (on average, it takes 5 minutes to find the right form).

With ePACT’s Admin App, faculty can access student information on the go:

• Sync updated records in real time for offline
• View student records at a glance
• Easily see critical information like flagged medical conditions or emergency contacts
• Send general and emergency messages to staff, parents, and emergency contacts

Connectivity & Communications

In an emergency, faculty may rely on phone trees or standard email services to share information and connect with students, families, and emergency contacts. If phone lines are impacted in an emergency (e.g. flooded with users, only usable for emergency calls, downed power lines or cell sites), it can be a challenge to reach the right people quickly.

ePACT provides faculty with three forms of communication – voice, email, and text messaging – to ensure that they can connect and share information with families as quickly as possible. Using one tool to communicate through three channels ensures messaging redundancy so schools can be confident that parents are receiving the messages they need to, and can speed up the reunification process for families as well.

 

Want to learn more about ePACT for schools? Check out our Frequently Asked Questions or contact us directly to discuss how your school can benefit from replacing paper forms, improving student safety, and ensuring happier families:

 

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