QR codes have had a spotlight year. Restaurants, amid Covid-19 concerns, replaced paper menus with the tech, black-and-white squared patterns that you scan with your phone, and businesses and health care providers implemented the codes as a means for contactless check-in and more.
For La Salle, one of the region’s largest all-male Catholic high schools, QR codes have helped keep its sports teams safe during a global pandemic.
The school, for the last several months, has been using a QR code system to track and monitor hundreds of student-athletes and coaches and more easily manage the mounds of data that comes with all that.
Dan Forcum, head athletic trainer at La Salle and an employee at Beacon Orthopaedics, initially came up with the idea back in May. He had just receive word sports may resume summer conditioning after a multi-week hiatus, and the program’s current method for checking in student-athletes included tedious and time-consuming front-door screenings. He thought there’s got to be a better way.
“Generally speaking, we’re dealing with teenagers who understand technology, and they all have a phone,” Forcum said. “So we started brainstorming. First we thought we could use a text, but we couldn’t figure out how to do that. And email wouldn’t work. But what if we use a QR code?”
After some trial and error, the system took shape: training staff essentially taped a piece of paper to the wall outside the weight room, for example, and the athlete can open up their phone camera, scan the QR code, follow the link, and complete a seven- or eight-question survey and ensuing manual temperature check.
All that data, within seconds, pops into a Google sheet, or online spreadsheet. Any red flags are easy to see.
To maintain privacy, the kids are identified by their student ID number and the coaches by their birthday. The system easily allows Forcum and others to add or take away survey questions. After a beta testing period during the last week of May, the program went live.
Other schools, Forcum said, have resorted to using pen and paper, where trainers have to shout out the information – name and temperature – for someone else to record.
“For us, we’re using a system that’s faster, more efficient, safer and HIPAA-compliant,” Forcum said. “It’s an ever-changing, ever-adapting system, because as we’ve seen, Covid changes, regulations change, guidelines change. Everything’s fluid. This can be fluid with it.”
The program is used by students, sports medicine officials, coaches, managers, cheerleaders and more. On any given day, Forcum said, La Salle is tracking as many as 300 people.
Forcum said countless schools around the region – and the state and beyond – have adopted the system; he’s taken an open source approach to sharing it with others. Beacon Orthopaedics partners with over 30 high schools and outside sports teams in the city, like Kings Hammer and Cincinnati United soccer clubs, and Forcum said the QR code system has also been used by St. Xavier, Oak Hills, Moeller and more.
Forcum said there are applications for the technology beyond Covid that could be useful too.
“Now we have this process in place, where do we take it from here?” Forcum asked. “Hopefully we can outfit it so if there’s a flu outbreak, or a strep outbreak within a team, you can successfully track and manage it.”
