As a camp program administrator, chances are you’re in the weeds of a hiring crisis and working through mountains of registration data. You may not even have had a chance to think about health forms, let alone have an hour to spend on another “demo” that ends up feeling like a generic walkthrough of an undifferentiated suite of features. Unfortunately a list of buttons doesn’t tell you how a system behaves on a Tuesday in July when the volume is high and your team is exhausted. It’s not easy to find something that you know will actually work with your process, which is why, to get the most out of your time, it’s important to look past the “standard product demo” and run a few reality checks.

But where to even begin? Here are a few key considerations you should make when evaluating health form software providers.

Families rarely provide health updates based on your office hours—they do it when they can find the time. An allergy profile may be updated at midnight before check-in or an asthma trigger may be clarified after the bus has already left the parking lot.

The problems that arise in situations like this are the next step in the process. Unless you have a dedicated system and process for these scenarios, a staff member must now act as a human router. They’re the one who is relied on to move that information onto a roster, spreadsheet or print out. If that person forgets to make the update or the new roster doesn’t make its way to everyone, it puts a child at risk.

How to test this live:

Tell the vendor to enter an allergy update in real time. Then ask to see what an authorized staff member (say someone off-site or on the other side of campus) sees five seconds later.

If the process involves someone in the office having to approve, sync or reprint anything, you’ve found a bottleneck. You’re not looking for a digital filing cabinet, but a system that transmits the data by itself. Of course, not everyone should have access to all sensitive PHI (personal health information), but it’s important that necessary staff are informed and prepared in the event of an emergency.

Medication work is easy when things everything is running as expected. But when a label on a bottle doesn’t match the digital form, or when a parent changes a dose at the check-in table, your staff will make a decision in the moment because that is what they are trained to do.

The risk with that is what happens to that decision later on, because if essential information isn’t passed on, and it’s the incoming shift that’s left to simply pick up where that person left off; it can quickly turn into a high-stakes guessing game. Your system should alleviate this.

The Drill: Have the vendor walk you through one medication exception. Look at three things:

• Can you quickly identify the change that was just made so it doesn’t get buried in a list of a hundred kids?
• Where does the staff record their specific reasoning?
• What should the next shift be able to see during their window without anyone having to verbally tell them anything?

Without the “why” being front and center for your team, they will spend their summer playing telephone to figure out what happened four hours ago, which isn’t good for anyone.

Handoffs can be the most dangerous part of any health workflow, but they don’t need to be. Staff get sick, they take days off, or they rotate through different parts of the program. Health records have to be able to carry the story when your most experienced lead isn’t in the room to explain it.

Instead of looking at the current view, ask for a “next morning” view. Pick a scenario where a participant was given an as-needed medication for a headache late at night.

What you want to see: You are checking to see if the morning shift can immediately tell that something happened, exactly why it happened, and whether follow-up is still needed. If the next person has to start their day by asking around or searching through individual profiles, the system is failing the continuity test.

Many programs run on staff effort and processes or systems that are either antiquated or don’t match the needs of the program. These solutions can work for while, but are likely either inefficient, unsafe, or both. If your current setup feels shaky on any of these points, expect the same old pain points to repeat: late updates that get missed, med decisions that lose their context, and shift changes that feel like a scavenger hunt.

We built our platform for these exact messy realities. If you want to see how we handle late-breaking data and shift handoffs without the manual cleanup work, let’s talk. We can show you how the system carries the load so your staff can stay focused on the program.