Something to Announce

Welcome back, it’s been a long time! Today we’re here to let you know about the first of several new features we have planned for this summer. Anyway, let’s get to it.

What we’ve added is a method for us to notify you, our users, of important happenings in the Therapylog universe such as eligibility updates and scheduled downtime. The announcements are displayed in a box at the top of Therapylog in the same area as the FAQ buttons, as shown in the following screenshot.

The text of the announcement is a link to additional information such as links to regulatory information, training materials, and blog posts such as this one.

If you made it here through the announcement link you probably noticed that clicking it automatically hides the announcement at the top of the page. But, in the future if you don’t need the information presented you can simply dismiss the notification using the close button next to the link as shown below:

Any notifications that you’ve dismissed can be reviewed later via the “View All” link at the bottom of the TL News tab on the home page.

Finally, we recognize that not everyone wants to know about everything that’s going on so we’ve included the ability to unsubscribe from certain types of announcements (we’ll always let you know about down time). To customize what types of announcements you want to see head on over to the “Edit My Account” page; near the bottom you’ll find some new checkboxes:

Each of these boxes represents a category of announcement we’ll be making and unchecking the box will prevent us from displaying these to you.

Thanks for your time and happy computing!

Tyler Pickett, Lead Developer

Something to comment about

Greetings all, it's been quite a while since we've posted any of the multitude of features we're constantly adding but this one seemed like it deserved some special attention.  The request for this feature came from Carrie Key with Special School District.


Those of you who use our full therapy management system are probably familiar with the appointment documentation screen, and for those of you who don't may find something you'd like to use. Any way, what we've added is a little bit of automation for the quantitative progress inputs that takes what you fill in there and puts it in the first line of the comments section as a percentage allowing you to see it instantly and refer to it in your notes. Here is the form after it's been filled out and the page has calculated the percentages.

~Tyler Pickett

Brand New Calendar Format

If you've been using therapylog for a while, you've probably gotten used to the calendar interface.  For 2 years, our old calendar has been the place to go for scheduling, editing, documenting, and reviewing your therapy history.  It's been good to us, but the time has come to let it go and take another step forward towards making our website more useful to you.  Overall I hope this change isn't going to be too jarring, as many things just LOOK a little different, but function much the same.  However, as always, I'm here (as well as our partners at MSBA) to answer any questions you might have about how to interact with our new calendar format.  So, without any further introduction, let's take a peek at the new look of the therapylog calendar:

Above I've put two screenshots of the new calendar. They should look very familiar in some ways, but there are definite differences.  For one, you don't just have each day fully filled in with a color, you can actually see every appointment you have on that day.  Not surprisingly, if you click on one of those appointments, you can go directly to documenting/editing/unlocking it, rather than having to go to the day planner first.  This alone probably will save you 33% of the clicking you used to have to do.  But what about the day planner?  Well, it's still there, but it looks a little different too.  Heres what you see if you click on a day outside one of the actual appointments (or on the day number itself):

Again, this looks somewhat similar;  It's a day, divided up into hours.  But there's a nice touch now, in that each hour is divided up into 15 minute segments, and your appointments are aligned to show exactly where inside that hour they start and stop, quite a visual step up from what used to be just a vague approximation.  Another nice touch is that if you're working through your week, rather than having to go back to the calendar between each day, you can just use the links at the top left and top right to go to the next or previous day of the month, easily moving from one day to another in one click.  

I really hope you enjoy these new improvements to the calendar, and that you'll let us know if you have other ideas for how to make our system better (especially because these improvements are based on suggestions we've received directly from you, our therapists).

And let me point out, before closing, that I can't take credit for these shiny new features.  This is all the work of our most recently hired software developer, Tyler Picket, and I think you'll agree that he's been a great addition to our team.

Like what you see?  Have suggestions to make this feature even better?  Let us know in the comments!

A little help for the script generator

We've made an important change to the prescription generator that we think you need to know about (if you're an administrator, that is.  If you're a therapist, this won't affect you).

In the past the generator has been used to build prescriptions for students who currently need them (that is, because they have no script or because the currently existant script is expired).

However, there are situations where a district might want to go ahead and generate their prescriptions for all students that will expire in the next 60 days or something like that, and up until now you haven't been able to do that (you just had to wait until they expired).

That problem is no more:

On this new screenshot, you can see that in the top left corner, there is a place for you to select what date you want to check script expirations for.  Just pick a date 60 days in the future, hit refresh, and you'll be able to generate scripts for all your students who will expire between now and then.

Thanks for the feedback from everyone who made this happen, we only get better because of your suggestions!

Goal Graphing, another improvement

In the wake of our recent improvement that allowed dates to be listed on printed graphs, another request came into my inbox to have the name of the goal printed on the graph as well.  Well, that only makes sense, so from now on, this is what your student progress graphs will look like:

That text at the top is the goal text, so when you print this graph off, you'll have no problem remembering what it applies to.

Do you have an idea for an improvement to therapylog?  Let us know!

Student Goals and their Limits

A couple weeks ago, I got this email from Beth White as SSD:


Hello- In trying to get my caseload set for next year, I started erasing old goals and adding new ones. However, I realized the teacher that is seeing that student NOW still needs those old goals in there because she hasn't billed for them yet. I didn't realize that it's all ONE thing. I thought that under my log on name was what I controlled and what was under someone else's log on name they had what they set up. Apparently that's not the case. I forgot what student it was, but I deleted all OT goals because I thought it was just extra stuff that I didn't need, but now the OT is going to wonder what happend to all her goals... In the future could we make it separate? Am I explaining this correctly? Thanks 


Unfortunately, this isn't the first time we've seen something like this.  But we can't exactly make them separate for different therapists, because those goals are part of the IEP, which belongs to the student.  However, given how frequently we've been confronted with this issue, we've decided to try tackling it in a sensible way.  As of today, here's how goals work:


- goals can now be categorized as "PT, OT, ST, or ALL". 


- If you are a PT, than you will see all student goals for your kiddos that are categorized as "PT" or "ALL".  Same for the other disciplines.


- If there are goals in the list that you don't think belong to you, just set them to the category you think they belong to, and they won't show up in your list anymore (either when looking at the students goals or when scheduling services).


Now, we aren't sure yet if this is going to create any issues, which is why it's something of an experiment.  If this works out, great!  If not, we'll roll it back and try something else.  

A Tweak for your Lesson Plan

Here's a small change requested by one of our therapists at Jackson R-II, Mary Holzum.

Mary pointed out that she'd really like to be able to put boxes on her lesson plan so that she could check off successes or failures on student attempts right on the same sheet.  It's a small enough thing that we decided to take care of it this same week, and now when you print off a "Detailed Lesson Plan" for a day, this is what you'll see:

There are 10 boxes over on the right (underneath the progress numbers) which you can use however you like.  Mary mentioned that she uses pluses and minuses to keep count of each attempt, so if that sounds like something that works for you, great!  However, we've also tried to put it in a place that wasn't used for anything already, so if this little addition doesn't matter to you, it shouldn't detract from anything you're doing.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mary!