AURORA | Those cheery murals and time-killing toys aren’t fooling anybody.
Between the stressed-out, sleep-deprived parents and the pervasive nasal waterfalls, the waiting room at a pediatrics clinic is never an enjoyable place to be, no matter how many sterilized puzzles and animal-shaped chairs are strewn around the room.
In an effort to reduce the number of trips parents and kids make to those less-than-enjoyable incubators of sickness this year, an Aurora elementary school and a San Francisco-based startup have teamed up to curb the spread of illnesses.
Eastridge Community Elementary School was selected earlier this year to take part in the FLUency program, a new mobile app that allows parents and school officials to keep tabs on kids’ health using smartphone-enabled thermometers.
“The progam is a way for schools to keep their communities healthier by knowing more about what’s going on around them,” said Nita Nehru, marketing and community manager for Kinsa, the startup spearheading the program. “We have so much access to knowledge around us with Google Maps and Waze and Foursquare, but we have very little information about when and where symptoms and illnesses are starting.”
The program provides participating parents with free thermometers that can automatically and anonymously upload fever symptoms to a group specific to their child’s school within the Kinsa app. Other flu-like symptoms, such as aches and pains or a runny nose, can be uploaded manually, according to Nehru.
“By the time you get that notice from a school that the flu is going around, that usually means a few students have come to the nurse exhibiting symptoms, that they’ve been in school and that they’ve infected a whole group of kids,” she said. “With Kinsa, you can see it at the source when the temperature is taken and before the kid ever gets to school.”
Eastridge is one of about 40 schools in the country currently using the FLUency app, according to Nehru, who said that program came to the school after Brandon Loy, the school nurse at Eastridge, expressed interest in bringing it to Aurora. More than 1,000 schools nationwide have applied to participate in the free program.
Loy said that the initial launch of FLUency at Eastridge has gone well, but because the app has only been live for about two weeks, it’s too early to determine what kind of effect it’s having on overall student health.
“I approach it with parents as, ‘Hey, this could save you a trip to the doctor’s office,’” Loy said. “The goal is that we have more understanding from our families regarding the potential of this tool, and I’m hoping the number of members continues to go up.”
She added that the Eastridge group within the Kinsa app had 127 users as of Nov. 21. The app has slightly more than 4,000 total users, according to Nehru.
Though still in its first school year of use, FLUency experienced success during a pilot program with 18 schools last winter, according to Nehru. She said that all of the pilot schools, including Peck Elementary School in Jefferson County, had fewer kids who missed school because they were sick while the app was in use from January through March.
“All of the schools had reduced sick days, and we can’t take full credit, but it’s hard to deny the correlation,” she said.
Nehru said boosting student attendance is the major purpose of the app, as schools stand to lose money when students don’t show up to class. The cost per absence for Colorado schools is about $32 per student, according to a state Department of Education report. The number comes from a per-pupil funding formula and the number of days a child is annually in the classroom.
Loy said that she doesn’t yet know how the app will impact attendance at Eastridge, and that the aim is to make parents understand that they shouldn’t force kids to go to school when they’re feeling under the weather — especially during flu season.
“My hope is that it will reduce the number of parents who send children to school with fevers or what I would consider flulike symptoms, and (parents) realize that these children should really be at home,” she said.
Loy said that she has not yet seen any flu-like symptoms in Eastridge students this school year.