CastleBranch at JSU: what goes in your tracker

What CastleBranch is at JSU

CastleBranch is the secure document service JSU's School of Nursing uses to hold every clinical compliance record. The 2024-25 graduate handbook refers to it three ways: an "approved secure service," the Graduate Nursing Student Tracker System and "JSU SON's document tracker site." All three point to the same account.

You open the account when you are admitted, not when your first practicum gets close. The handbook spells out the stakes: students "may be prohibited from progressing in the program (i.e. registering for courses) if the required documentation is not submitted by the established due date." A lapsed upload can therefore stall registration itself, well before any clinical start date.

When something inside the account goes wrong, the handbook sends you to the CastleBranch coordinator, a role held by the School of Nursing's Director of Clinical Services. The zero-credit NU 8002 BSN-DNP Online Orientation course lists document tracking among its topics, so setting up the tracker belongs to your first term.

The five forms you sign in the tracker

Next to the uploads, the handbook's documentation requirements include five signed documents. They are acknowledgments rather than health records, which is why students overlook them: none of them shows an expiration date that nags you.

• HIPAA statement
• Handbook Acknowledgment
• Professional Scholars Code Policies
• Code of Conduct Standards for Professional Behavior
• Exposure Release of Liability Student form

Two further JSU documents come from the tracker itself. The Health Insurance form is downloaded each year from the document tracker site, and the Initial Health Appraisal form has to be signed by a medical professional within the past six months. Sign and upload all of these early in your first term so none of them holds up a clearance later.

Why the tracker comes before any site

CastleBranch matters most at the moment a preceptor or site enters the picture. JSU wants your malpractice proof uploaded and approved in the tracker before you contact any practicum or residency site, so a clean file is what opens the door to outreach. Our site approval guide walks through the rest of that sequence.

Your file also travels. The handbook says background check results are shared with administrative staff at the clinical sites you are assigned to, and a hospital may add onboarding steps of its own beyond JSU's list. Riverview Regional in Gadsden, for example, wants its student profile form no later than two weeks ahead of a student's first clinical day, and it stops students with missing documentation from going on.

Our background check and drug screen guide covers the checks that sit in and around the tracker.

How we keep your file site-ready

Jax State Preceptor is built around JSU's clinical process, and CastleBranch is where that process starts. Before we approach a single preceptor for you, we review your tracker with you item by item against the dates of the course you need, so no item expires partway through the term.

Whether or not JSU plays a part in your placement, we find a preceptor and site that satisfy its rules and have the paperwork lined up when they say yes. We gather what JSU's faculty need about the preceptor, from license and board certification to where and how they practice, along with the site facts a contract calls for. The decision stays with the faculty; our part is a file with no gaps for them to chase.

Send your program and the term your clinicals begin through the form at the bottom of this page or the contact page, and your tracker review comes first.