According to Schoolnutrition.org’s website, under the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) nearly 100,000 schools/institutions serve school lunches to 29.6 million students each day, including 20.1 million free lunches and another 1.7 million at reduced price. What we’ve learned during the COVID-19 pandemic is how just many children depend on this source of food and are not getting vital nutrition as a result of in-person school being suspended or delayed.
Add to this challenge, even in affluent areas of the United States, internet connectivity and adequate computers are not available at home to
While these issues have been laid bare, another challenge that has lesser attention is healthcare for the same kids and homes. Many of these same kids don’t receive proper or preventative healthcare for the same reasons that nutrition is challenging. Parents don’t have the means, can’t take time off of work or have stiff competition for resources in the household.
Several organizations have been working on the link between children, schools, parents, healthcare professionals and payers. CareDox has been working on the link between schools, parents, school nurses and payers. There are other EHR companies who have been working on this as well, to include Schooldoc, Healthmaster, and Welligent.
The key is not technology alone, it’s developing the much-needed ecosystem between payers, healthcare providers, parents and their children. But here’s the opportunity to leverage schools as the central points and facilities to solve a number of problems.
- Invest in school nurses and supporting healthcare providers to be able to provide care for children, not just reactively, but proactively, inclusive of vaccinations and verifying medication compliance. In the long term, the investment here could avoid billions of dollars in future healthcare costs.
- Encourage insurance companies and payers to support clinics in schools, much the way networks are now looking at partnering with grocery, big box and drug stores to establish convenient clinics in those locations. Local and federal government health services can lead this approach as well and have the ability to help particularly disadvantaged communities to access healthcare and medications.
- Enable communication and collaboration with parents through technologies like health record access, messaging, provisioning inexpensive devices like phones and tablets so that healthcare providers can communicate with parents, keeping them in the loop, providing education and enabling vital participation.
- Use data to determine effectiveness, short circuit community health issues and evaluate investments to ensure impactful health services.
It may be difficult to consider this opportunity as we observe the debates, risks and challenges of reopening schools across the country, but this is the time to consider such things, while we’re trying to understand how we’ll vaccinate and monitor the health of millions of children.