The first use of Allergy in BVCMS, now TouchPoint, was in Check-In. We want/need to know if a child is allergic to something that a nursery worker or teacher might give the children during the course of the class time. So, we added a field for Allergy to Check-In (By the way, we are testing our new version of iPad Check-In even as you read this! Stay tuned for more about that.).

Then, as online registrations became such a huge, highly-used feature of TouchPoint, we added Ask Allergies as an option in the Questions portion. This morphed into Allergies / Medical Information, which caused some of the labels for this to become just Medical.

People began using this field for way too much information! That one little field on a person's record, regardless of where we captured the information ( Check-In , Online Registration , or manually inputted) was getting way over-loaded. TMI, people!!

The purpose still remains the same: teachers/leaders need to know about food allergies, in order to avoid giving a child something he is allergic to, or contact allergies if it relates to something a child would normally come in contact with during Sunday School.

I could go on and on, but I'm really tired of talking about this.

Bottom line: we have returned to our roots (and no, I'm not talking about leaving off the henna) and are using the correct term, which is purely and simply Allergies .

Why do anything? We are making this change back to what we initially used because sometimes our first ideas are our best, and more importantly, to keep people from entering information in that field that is NOT an allergy.

If you need to know about other physical conditions that might affect someone on a trip or at camp, just use a text field in the online registration. Keep the Allergy field an allergy!