The College’s Health and Wellness Center introduced the Medicat Patient Portal on February 7, which allows students to make appointments and upload their health history.
The service is accessible to all students through my.lakeforest.edu or lakeforest.medicatconnect.com.
Department Assistant for Health and Wellness Siobhan Michelotti helped organize the effort to make the Patient Portal available. “This is something a lot of other colleges are doing,” Michelotti said. “The hope is now students can make appointments, so we’re saving them a walk, and we can work around their schedules. It can make things run smoother.”
Associate Director of Health Services Kathy Salinger said that the Portal will likely lessen or remove the time students spend waiting to be seen. “It is challenging trying to see everybody that wants to be seen in a timely fashion,” Salinger said. “We’re trying to switch this year primarily from a walk-in clinic to trying to get students to schedule. Ideally, we don’t want students to have to wait.”
Students can make appointments for reasons such as sexual health, athletic physicals, women’s health, injections, and lab testing. Salinger said illness is the most common reason for an appointment, followed by athletic physicals. “This time of year, everyone’s got a virus,” Salinger said.
There are also more serious concerns. “Every athlete needs to be checked once a year for risk factors [associated with] sudden cardiac death,” Salinger said. “Most of those athletes don’t go home to get that.”
Salinger said Health Services and Counseling Services share the Portal, working together to provide holistic healthcare for students. “We work very collaboratively with the Counseling Center. We’re all one team,” she said. “We do both emotional support in collaboration with Counseling Center and physical health.”
For Counseling Services, students can only make an initial appointment through the Portal to meet with a therapist. After that initial intake, Michelotti said, “They can get their schedule with the therapist down, but people cannot make same-day appointments.”
The Portal also allows students to enter their immunization dates, although they still must submit a hard copy. “[The Portal] will have all your information and it’s completely secure,” Michelotti said.
Health Services will create awareness for the Portal through brochures and emails. In addition to launching the Portal, Health Services will now have walk-in hours twice a day from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Michelotti said the Health and Wellness Center also aims to become more environmentally friendly with increased usage of the Portal. “Our goal is to go paperless,” Michelotti said. “All of our forms are on here [the Portal], and Kathy [Salinger] can email a student after getting the results. Everything is at [a student’s] fingertips, so why shouldn’t this be as well?”
Contact Michelotti with any questions regarding the Portal at michelotti@lakeforest.edu. Information on the Portal at lakeforest.edu/live/news/7910-forester-health-wellness-patient-portal.
