Kari Johnson, MSN, RN, is the Health Services Supervisor for Everett Public Schools in Washington State. She also consults to other districts nation-wide. 

When the pandemic started, Kari was trying to help her nurses track those with symptoms via a spreadsheet. 

It wasn’t working. So she switched to our tracker. You can hear what she has to say about her experience before and after using our tracker in this video and see the case study below.  

 
 

CASE STUDY: 

Overview: 

There’s nothing Kari Johnson would like more than to not need Welfie’s COVID tracker in the fall -- but she knows that’s not realistic. 

COVID won’t be gone by then, and, as the Health Services Supervisor for Everett Public Schools, she has to ensure that the 21000 students and all school staff can return to school safely.  

 
Kari Care Room Welfie.jpg
 

Welfie’s COVID tracker got her and her district’s school nurses through the first few waves of the pandemic, and she knows it will help get her through whatever comes next. 

Here’s what she was up against and how she and the tracker were able to keep her schools safer. 

Problem: 

Nurses are the unsung heroes of schools. They often have to look after 3 buildings each and manage the increasingly complex needs of their students. 

Everett’s school nurses were busy before, but throw in a pandemic, and well, let’s just say they needed a tracking tool that was robust enough to handle whatever the virus was going to throw at them but easy enough to use that busy nurses couldn’t break it by accidentally deleting something.  

And she needed a tool that could: 

  • Track those in quarantine ensuring they didn’t come back too early 

  • Trace the positives to help stop the spread 

Results:   

With a few small adjustments, Kari and her team were able to ensure that those who were in quarantine didn’t coming back too early AND trace positive cases to prevent further spread. 

That gave everyone piece of mind, and who knows, maybe even saved some lives. 

Plus, the tracker saved each member of Kari’s team hours every week, meaning Kari could focus on the health of students and staff rather than trying to manage a series of error-riddled spreadsheets. 

Helpful tips from Kari: 

Because families sometimes have children in different schools in the same district, early on,  families who had to go into quarantine or who had a family member test positive received multiple calls from different school nurses. So Kari instituted a point person system so one nurse would gather the information for everyone. 

She also recommends defining what various statuses are so everyone is using the terms, for example, probable, positive, etc.) in the same way.