At a Glance:

Since 2018, the South College School of Physician Assistant Studies in Nashville, TN, has been utilizing CORE's ELMS system to enhance their operational efficiency. The recent addition of custom fields for payment information has significantly streamlined the preceptor payment process, enabling team members to save time and start new rotations faster. CORE's evaluation reports have proven invaluable for tracking preceptor performance and identifying issues, while the system's real-time updates and streamlined onboarding process have further improved overall efficiency. The team believes that other programs could greatly benefit from the enhanced preceptor interactions, real-time updates, and customizable evaluation reports offered by ELMS.

Q&A with Lisa Rouse MPAS, PA-C, Director of Clinical Education and Jessica Arend, MBA, Clinical Education Administrator

Background: South College’s PA programs need to gather extensive information to send to accounts payable, including student rotation dates and preceptor details. Previously, this process was cumbersome, with Jessica having to cross-reference various reports to communicate with accounts payable. However, with the introduction of custom fields specific to payment, we created fields for payable amount, payee, and address, and performed a bulk update. Now, all necessary information is pulled from a single report, greatly simplifying the process. This recent improvement has been highly beneficial for streamlining our payment procedures.

CORE: What has been the impact of adding custom fields for payment information?

Jessica: “It's been so much better for me, taking so much less time to do generation. And before I was just getting the automated emails from CORE saying a preceptor has completed the final evaluation for their student and I would do them one at a time as they came in. 

Honestly, it's a much better system and I'm super grateful for it."

CORE: What have been the most significant benefits of using ELMS?

Jessica: "It's the fact that we can reach out to you when we need to because you can always help us run new forms or think of easier ways to do things. With most systems like this, you don't have a representative that's dedicated to help you."

CORE: CORE clearly helps you save time. How has this impacted your daily work routine? 

Jessica: "Honestly, it helps me get started on the next rotation faster because normally I would be spending a lot of time filling out these individual forms. And that helps me communicate if and when I run into problems sooner, so we can fix them sooner (such as if a preceptor drops)."

CORE: What other areas of the system do you find to be really beneficial?

Lisa: "I started running a report for the current schedule of students and I'm able to send that to the registrar and they can register the students for those courses. There are continuous changes in the schedule and it can be challenging to send updates to the registrar in real time. For example, a student may change from doing emergency medicine and now they’re going to be in family medicine. So now, the week prior to the quarter starting, I run my report because by then everything should be completed and can be sent directly to the registrar.”

Jessica: “The evaluations. We need to view and share the stats on student evaluations of preceptors. This has helped our program proactively monitor preceptor performance. It’s also made it easier to run reports on individual preceptors for their entire time precepting with our program.”

CORE: What are the ways other programs could benefit from CORE?

Lisa: “It streamlines the preceptors' interactions. Preceptors are busy and we're giving them cumbersome tasks to be part of this process. They might be less inclined to want to be a preceptor. I literally went into ELMS to see how long it would take for a preceptor to onboard. And it's about three minutes.

So I'm able to tell the preceptor that we need certain pieces of information and to complete the forms, it should take you less than three minutes”

And then after that, everything is digital as far as your evaluations. Our final evaluations are also part of the students' grade. We need to get those and give them in a timely manner. 

Jessica: “And it's useful that preceptors get real time updates. Whenever Lisa changes their schedules, she clicks on notify the preceptor and they automatically get an email saying that their schedule has been changed."