Client Profile 

• Name: Rona Dickman
• Title: Nurse
• School: Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy, Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School
• Location: Livingston, NJ
• Type: Co-educational Yeshiva day school
• Size: 751 students
• Website: jkha.org

Rona Dickman has served as a school nurse at Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy for the past seven years, addressing injuries and illnesses for students in grades pre-K through 12. She also sees students with chronic illnesses such as asthma, diabetes, and severe food allergies, and performs screens for height/weight, blood pressure, vision, hearing and scoliosis, as well as ensures all students are up-to-date with their immunizations. She enjoys working together with the students and parents to ensure the students’ optimal health in school.

Nurse Rona Dickman did some research before choosing Magnus for her school, Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy/Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School (RKHA/RKYHS). She looked into SNAP and had previous experience with Health Office, but both were missing a vital piece – the ability to collect and review health forms. “The biggest factors that contributed to choosing Magnus Health were the ability to collect and review health forms and send reminders automatically to parents,” Rona said.

After using SMR, Rona also noted the ease of use and customization options for charting, in addition to the benefits of running reports on collected data. “I can easily search through a particular student’s visits to the nurse’s office and see how often they’ve come in and if there are any patterns to their visits. For example, if they’ve often had headaches in the last month,” Rona explained.

Rona went on to describe the ways SMR has benefited the school including time, money, and resources savings, citing automatic reminders as one of the big reasons. Because automatic reminders go to parents with missing forms, and continuously do so, Rona said it “saves me from having to send emails manually for over 700 students, or having to make many phone calls.” Not only are savings incurred, but compliance has increased. “More parents are sending in their required forms. When parents realize they can fax or mail the forms to Magnus Health, and understand how much time is saved by the school, they are happy to use the program,” Rona stated. 

Email reminders, charting, treatment notes, immunizations – they’re all great, but perhaps the best part is that Rona can access them all remotely. “I am able to review forms over the summer, when I’m physically not in the school building,” she said. Even more importantly, Rona was able to continue providing care after a major natural disaster.

Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey in October 2012, devastating many. Thankfully JKHA/RKYHS only lost power and heat, but it was enough to close school for an entire week. “A local synagogue offered to house the school for a day once they had power and heat. I was able to set up shop in one of the offices, and had all the students’ health information accessible to me on the computer, even though we weren’t physically in the school building,” Rona explained.

So a day that had all the makings of being stressful, or the very least nonproductive, was “just like a normal day,” Rona said, adding “I saw students in the secretary’s office. They had a computer there in the office and they let me use it. It was just nice to be able to access everybody’s records.”

Every school will face normal days and not so normal days, but with the right tools you can continue to provide the high-level standard of care your school community expects and deserves every day.

P.S. Check out our Disaster Preparation and Recovery research paper and learn how to access critical health information during and after a disaster. 

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