The Amazing Expandable Hour!

Chalk another feature up to great suggestions from our users!  We got an email this week from Kara Baker (St. Louis Public Schools) where she made the following observation:


Sometimes I have 15 min sessions with some of my preschoolers, and whenever I schedule 4 of them in a one hour period, the sessions overlap with sessions before or after them, and you cannot see them as nicely as all the other sessions on my schedule for the day. There should be a way that the hour period expands to show each of these 15 min sessions so I can click on each session easily to edit/change/document the session. Thanks!

This is a great point! We hadn't considered that some therapists might have up so many appointments in so short a time, and the design of our website reflected that assumption;  but now we know better!  From today forward, on your day planner, if you have 2 or fewer items scheduled within an hour block, you will see the same sized hour period as you're used to:

However, if you continue to add more items to that hour, the period will automatically expand to accomodate your schedule:

Thanks, Kara, for the great suggestion.

Do you have another idea for how to make therapylog.com better?  Leave us a comment and let us know!

~Ethan

A new way to look at documentation

We had a great request from a therapist this week that really got me thinking.  This is from Catherine Weeks (Special School District):

some way of looking at student progress without having to generate an entire report. being able to click on a link to look at previous therapy day so I see what they did.

Of course our reports are available for large scale data extracts, but really what was needed here was a way to quickly reference progress while documenting in order to maintain continuity.  Thinking over her request, and doing some brainstorming with the development team here in the office, this is what we came up with:

Right now, there is a link on the documentation page for every goal.  In the past all it did was give you the full text of that goal, plus a few other supporting details. 

There's a new set of tools now, though.  When you click on those goal links in the documentation page, you'll be greeted with a new tabbed layout:

This first tab is the same as what was there before: the goal text plus any benchmarks and activities that were also recorded for this session.  The two tabs at the top of that window, though, are new.  "Progress graph", when clicked on, will provide you with the new charting feature that's available from the caseload, right here in the documentation area:

The final tab has a new set of information: all the previous comments and progress marks recorded for that goal, by date, all in a nice table for you:

If that doesn't make a therapist smile, I don't know what will.  :)

Thanks for the suggestion Catherine!  And if anyone else out there has ideas for how to make therapylog better, let us know!  We'd love to hear about it.

~Ethan

Printable Graphs!

Last week we released a new feature to allow therapists to graph their student's progress by goal.  We've been overwhelmed and amazed by the number of requests we've had in the last couple days along the following lines:


I love the new graphs! How do I print them???

Well, the short answer was "You can't".  Our vendor for the charting software was going to charge a lot of money for the "print" feature, and it just didn't seem worth it.  However, given the amount of demand we've had so far, it's been nothing if not unavoidable. Therefor, we went ahead and spent the cash, and the ability to export and print this chart has now been integrated into our website.

Here are the instructions:

1) First, pull up one of the charts from your student's goal page:

2) Now right-click (ctrl-click for Mac) the chart to get the context menu:

3) From here you can choose which format you want.  JPEG and PNG are both image files (like a photo), and PDF is what a lot of documents come in.  All three are printable, but if you're unsure or uncomfortable I would recommend PDF as it should do all the page margins for you when printing.  Once you click on the format you want, you'll see the export process begin:

4) When the progress bar hits 100%, the button at the bottom of the chart will change from "Waiting" to "Save":

5) Click on that "Save" button at the bottom of the chart, and the file dialog will come up to help you save the file:

From there you can do what you want with it:  Print it off, put it in your files for the student, whatever you want.

Remember, we're here to help make this product better for you.  Your ideas are welcome, and if we hear it enough it will happen one way or another. :)

~Ethan

Making Copies

In a lengthy email exchange this morning, we had a discussion with a therapist who had a suggestion for therapylog.com.  Liane Garner (North Kansas City) wrote in and had something to say about how we currently copy scheduled days:


Hello, I was just wondering if there was a way to copy a day to several dates, not just one. Many of us have the same clients on the same days of the week and it takes quite awhile to copy a Monday to every Monday of that month. If not, it would be great to be able to copy a date ahead to 3 or 4 dates at a time. Thank you, Liane

This is not the first time we've had a request like this, and Charvel gave a detailed response as to why we try not to do features like this anymore (edited for brevity):

Liane,

...I hope to be able to explain some of our reasoning behind not adding a feature like this...A long time ago we had a feature similar to what you are requesting...but ultimately [that feature] ended up in confusion. When therapists would plan too far in advance...by the time they got to their therapy day almost everything in the plan had changed anyway...therapists became very frusterated with having to delete [a student who left the district] out of each appointment in the future they had placed...all the copying they had done ended up saving them very little time. The ability to copy into a new day was our 'middle of the road' solution. It allows for quick planning in the near future, especially for the therapists who have predominantly static schedules, and avoids the confusion of blanket scheduling that we ran into before...I find the best scheduling usually goes out no more then two weeks in advance...far enough so that you are really only 'planning' twice a month...

Charvel

Liane was very gracious and understanding, but was also clever enough to inquire about a bit of a compromise:

Thank you for responding to my suggestion so quickly. While I understand the thinking behind the decision to not allow copying too far ahead, it seems that at least being able to copy to 2 dates ahead would be beneficial. As far as planning goes, I find that no matter what I put in the "plan" part of the program, it invariably changes right before or during the session anyhow. I, almost always, edit the session before documenting. If I have a student taken out of a group, then, I edit them out at the documenting stage. But, the process of copying even one week to the next is taking additional time that could be cut in half with the ability to copy two weeks at a time. Thank you, Liane

And you know what? She's right. We don't want to open up the feature to indefinite copying, but her suggestion definitely has merit, and we try not to stand in the way of what people want.

Thus, it is my pleasure to introduce the new copy-day feature:

With the addition of the optional second date field, you can (if you wish) copy your appointments to the next two days they will fall on instead of just one.  Thanks for the feedback Liane, we always appreciate an opportunity to add something helpful.

Do you have an idea for another enhancement for Therapylog?  Let us know by leaving us a comment!

~Ethan

Better Report Format for Spreadsheets

There's been a problem for a while with our "spreadsheet" reports.  Not a problem, I guess, but more of a frustration.  We've been generating our reports in a "CSV" format (comma seperated value) because it's easy and Excel can read it (so can other spreadsheet programs).  However, the lack of formatting seems to throw some users off, especially those that are less comfortable with how Excel works.  In order to better cater to that group we're now experimenting with a new library that allows us to write directly to real excel (*.xls) files.  To try out this feature for your reports, and see if the format works better for you, see the screen shot below:

"CSV Spreadsheet" gives you the same spreadsheet report you're used to, but "Excel Spreadsheet" does the work of trying to format the columns to be the right length and things like that.  Try it out, and let us know what you think in the comments!

~Ethan

What to do about Inactive students

This week we had a question come in from Opal Shanks (Jackson R-2):

When I went into therapy log to find the students in question and make sure their IEP’s and Evals were correct, I could not find them in them listed in the student directory in therapy log. They are not showing up.  I now have the following questions: If they were made inactive, would they still show up in therapy log? Is there a chance that they could have deleted from the system when the system was updated?  Is there a place to go and look for inactive students? I believe inactive students used to show up in the student directory, but showed as inactive (there was a “make active” and “make inactive” area to click on). Where do the student’s go if we make them inactive and why can we not see them? Can we get them back?      

Ok, so maybe that's more than "a question", but it all concerns the same topic:  "How do I view my inactive students".  This comes right on the heels of another user who didn't want to see the inactive students in the roster anymore because it was cluttering the view up.  In order to solve both problems, there's a new link on the student roster page for admins that says "See Inactive Students".  This link will toggle the table to show you the inactive students only.  So now you can look at your student roster without getting bogged down by the students that aren't there anymore, but you can still go back and look at the students who used to be there (and make them active again if you want).

If you're an administrator, try it out and tell us what you think!

~Ethan

Graphing Progress, Part 2

A couple days ago we launched a new feature that allows therapists to visualize their student's progress on their goals with a neat new graph.  It was pretty popular, and this post is to say that we've already made our first enhancement to it.

Most goals for students are defined in some sort of quantitative terms.  For example, Jimmy will be able to do X activity with Y% accuracy.  What we wanted was a way for our new progress graphs to show how a student is measuring up against that target.

So now, when you are editing a students goals, the form will look like this:

As you can see, there's a new field in there called "Target Percentage" (which is completely optional).  If you choose to use it, though, you get a nice enhancement when you look at your graph for that goal:

There are now 3 lines on the graph.  One (green) going from data point to data point, another (red) representing the "trend" of that student's progress (a linear regression on the data points), and a third (blue) showing the TARGET line going from the student's initial progress measurement for that time period to the target point at the end of the period.  With this data, therapists can see at a glance how a student is doing on a goal, and how they were expected to be doing for that same time period. 

Have another idea for how we could do things to make your work easier?  Leave us a note in the comments!

~Ethan

Printable Goals

Although many of our feature requests require some vetting before we just jump right in, some are so straightforward that we end up taking care of them the same day.  Just this afternoon I got the following email from Liz Jones (Special School District):

Is there anyway to print the goals that are active for either some or all of my students on my caseload? Sometimes it would be nice to have handy all of the goals for each student that are active in therapy log printed out... especially when working on planning and/or to keep track of what goals you have or have not worked on yet. Thanks! I love all the new improvements you all keep coming up with!

I thought about what she was asking for, and realized that there were really two different ways to provide printed goals, and that I wasn't sure which would be more helpful to her. Because of this, I asked for some clarity before going any further:


Ms Jones,

I can definitely see where that would be helpful. Would you be looking for the ability to just get all the active goals for a given student anytime you want? Or more for the ability to get a full listing of all students on your caseload with their active goals in one go? The reason I ask is that the former would probably best be done as a direct PDF download in your caseload, whereas the latter is more of a "report".

~Ethan


Of course, when you give someone a choice, you must be always prepared for the ever-probable reply ("BOTH!"):


Really either way sounds good..... On one hand, I am thinking that a full listing of all my students on my caseload with their active goals in one go would be great.... I could just run a report then whenever I needed to and/or whenever I wanted to sit and plan my therapy. On the other hand, if I wanted to print the goals for just a few kids or even one kid to bring to an IEP or for planning that would be nice too......

I just find that when I sit down and plan it would be nice to have all my kids and their active goals in one spot to make planning easier.... to make sure I am really addressing each and every one of my student's goals on their IEPs instead of having to go through multiple steps to make sure I am hitting all of the goals equally.

:)


Well, I DID say both were possible, and since she felt like both would be helpful, who am I to stand in the way of making our product better?

Therefore, I am pleased to announce TWO new features for printing off your student's goals. First, if you just want to get all the active goals for a single student on paper, than access your student through your caseload, view their goals, and you'll see a new button on that page that says "Print Active Goals":

As you might expect, pressing that button will immediately generate a simple PDF file with all the active goals for that student included.  All you have to do is print. 

However, if you're looking for a complete listing of all the students on your caseload and their goals, you should instead head over to the "reports" page, where we've built a new report just for this need:

It's a simple report, just a PDF file listing every active student on your caseload, each followed by a table containing all the active goals for that student.  Perfect for having all your info in one document.  Thanks for the feedback, Liz!

Your requests are important to us, because they make our product better, and I hope you can see that when people ask for things that we think are reasonable, we just do it!

Have your own idea for how to make Therapylog.com better?  Let us know by leaving us a comment, we'd love to make your idea a reality.

~Ethan

Graphing your Student's Progress on Goals

Not all the new features we do are a result of a request from one of our therapist-users;  sometimes one of us just has an idea for something we think would be really cool.  The feature I want to tell you about today falls into that category.

We've always thought it would be neat to provide some graphing abilities to therapists within the website so they can easily visualize things like student progress over time or time spent with students.  Now we've taken the first step in that direction by experimenting with a chart that's built into your caseload as of last night (10/20/2009).

This graph is a result of the design efforts of Collin Swearingen, who many of you know as the friendly first point of contact.  Collin and I were talking last week about maybe doing charts for therapists, and I asked him to design the graph that would be most useful to therapists soonest, so we could start playing with the idea.  He came through with a great concept, and now I want to show it to you.

First of all, this graph applies to quantitative student progress.  In order to use it, you'll want to be focusing on a student for whom you've kept this kind of data through therapylog during the documentation process:

Let's start by going to your caseload.  On your caseload, you should see every student you work with.  For the purpose of this graph, think of a student for whom you've kept quantitative progress data, and click on his/her "Student Goals" link:

This will take you to the student goals page for that student, where you should notice something different.  Namely, the goal names are now links:

Just click on the name of the goal you want to graph progress for, and a chart will popup as an overlay:

Cool, huh? On the y-axis, you can see the percentage of success for each appointment.  Each point on the graph represents one session that student went through for that goal (where quantitative progress was kept).   Hover over any point to find out the date of that service:

Also note the dates at the top of the chart.  The range defaults to the last month, but you can edit the dates to be whenever you want.  Anytime you edit a date, the chart will automatically redraw itself for the new date range.

So there it is, an experimental new feature that we want to hear from you about.  Do you like it?  Or not?  Would you change something to make this chart better?  Are there other places you'd like to see charts like this come up?  Or do you have other ideas for ways to make your data more accessible?  We want to hear about it, so leave us a comment!

~Ethan

Human-Friendly Reports

A very good point was brought up this week by a collection of our users at Special School District: most humans don't think like computers. 

When a computer wants to select data between two dates, it must choose a time down to the second to compare the selection to; usually this is midnight.  So if you ask a computer to find all the things that happened between January 1st and January 31st, it will give you a list of everything from 12:00 AM on the first to 12:00 AM on the 31st.  Of course, for a human this might not make sense.  When a human wants information about January, they'll say "I want to know about everything from the 1st to the 31st", and they'll actually want to see the things that happened on the last day of January too!

Well, as a programmer, I'll admit I usually think more like the computer than like other people, so when I wrote the reporting module for Therapylog.com, that's exactly what I did wrong:  I made the date ranges function the way a computer would expect.  Thanks to the feedback from our SSD friends, though, I've changed my ways! 

That's right, all the reports in Therapylog now should be giving you the data the way you'd expect to see it.  That is, if your run a report for Jan-1 to Jan-31, you're going to get everything from January, no question about it.

Thanks to those at SSD who brought this to our attention;  it's your feedback and others like it that keeps making our service better.

~Ethan

Activity Overload

Some of the feature requests we get from users are so forehead-slapping-ly obvious, we can't believe we didn't think of them ourselves. Such is the case with a very common-sense observation made by Beth A White (Special School District) in an email she sent to me last month (Sep 25):


HI- I would really like to have a spot where I could list one activity for a group, instead of having to retype all the same activity for the 5 kids I might have at the same time. Is this possible?... I guess I could cut and paste, but ... just wondering if there was another way. Beth


What she's asking for makes a lot of sense. In most cases, if you're working with a group, you will be working on the same activity with all the kiddos present. That's why we decided to go ahead and make the adjustment for her (and for all of you) as quickly as possible. The scheduling form is something we modify with great care and only after serious though, because it's such a critical part of our website, but in this case I felt it was important to go ahead and get the project done. Here's the result:

As you can see, there's a new button below every activity, and it does exactly what Beth was looking for.  Have 5 students in your group and want to use the same activity for all of them?  Just add all your students to the group like usual, then fill in the activity for one of them and press the button right below it.  Like the label says, it will take that activity and copy it into every other student's first activity box, saving you the effort of retyping it or copying and pasting several times.

As we've said before, we want to help you improve your workflow wherever we can.  Do you have ideas or suggestions for ways to improve this application?  Leave us a comment, and we promise we'll do everything we can to make it happen.

~Ethan

A little tweak goes a long way

We love adding big new features that help our users track their medicaid billing more easily, but the little things are important too. I got this email last week from Mary Holzum (Jackson School District):


"Ethan, I love the new student summary progress reports but they include all the goals not just the speech/language goals. It would be better to just have the speech/language goals if that is possible. Thanks, Mary Holzum"


This wasn't an easy thing for us because we don't have our goals labeled as "Speech goals" or "Physical Therapy goals" (Maybe we should, but that's another issue). However, Mary made a really good point: as a therapist, you aren't interested in the student's progress on the goals that you aren't working on. All that extra info was just noisy and in the way.

So, in light of her feedback, I've fixed up this report so from now on it will only shows you the goals that YOU worked on with this student in the time period specified. This should help the users of the "Student Progress Summary" report (available for therapists) get more out of their data by only giving you what's pertinent to your work with that kid.

We really want to make these kind of improvements for you, and are looking as always for good ideas for how to make our website better. Have a thought? Leave us a comment! Your suggestion could be the next one featured here on the blog!

~Ethan

No more cluttered Student Rosters

You can't have too much of a good thing! Yesterday we filled a request to not show inactive therapists on the roster anymore. Today, I got the following email from Tracie Rinehart (New Madrid County R-I):

It would be nice if, when I make a student in-active that they would be placed in another section or make them show up a different color.

Not one to disappoint, we've made a similar adjustment to the student records as we did with the therapist records. As an admin, when you mark a student inactive, you just aren't going to see him/her anymore. It's still in the database, we can bring him back if you need us to, but until then the old data will be out of your way.

Thanks for the suggestion, Tracie!

Do you have another idea for making our website better? Let us know with a comment, we'd love to help.

~Ethan

Keep those tabs straight

We had a special request come in recently from Opal Shanks (Jackson R-II) regarding the tabs on your homepage. If you're an administrator, you may have noticed that if you click on your "Admin Tools" tab, than every time you do something else and come back to the homepage, you have to click the "Admin" tab again because it was always starting on the "Therapist Tools" tab. This extra step should no longer stand in your way, as the website will now remember what tab you've most recently clicked while you're on the website, and when you come back to the page, it will take you right back to where you left off. Thanks for the idea, Opal!

Have another idea that could help our website? Leave us a comment and let us know!

~Ethan

New and Improved maintenance of your therapists.

If you're an administrator at a school district, than you have a lot of stuff to deal with.  Every year, some new therapists come on, and some old ones leave.  Keeping those records up to date in our system shouldn't have to be a hassle.

So far we've already had the first part of that equation taken care of (adding therapists), and if you're an admin you can do this from your therapist roster like in the screen shot below:

The other half of the equation we just hadn't addressed yet, though.  To be fair, there are some technical problems to consider.  We can't just let users delete therapists from the website, because we need to keep those records for audit purposes.  On the other hand, we don't want admins to have to have all their old therapists on their rosters indefinitely, as that will eventually make the amount of data they have to sit through unmanageable.  So we did nothing, paralyzed by the fear of making the wrong decision (I'm sure everyone knows that feeling).  The problem came to a head yesterday though when Beth Michaelis (North Kansas City) emailed me with a question:

"I need some therapists removed from my therapy Roster. Is this something I can do, and if so, how do I do it?"

Well, technically we wanted it to be possible to do from the admin console, but we hadn't found the best way to do it yet, so I asked her to let me take care of her list personally so that we could make sure our new process worked well.   Without further ado, here it is:

First, you need to get to your therapist roster.  If you don't know where that is, just start at your homepage, and then click the "Admin Tools" tab (as you may have guessed, only administrators can do this).

Once you're looking at the admin tools, you need to click on "Therapists" to get to your roster.

Once on the roster, you will notice a new link by every therapist that says "Mark Inactive":

When you click this link, you will get a confirmation request asking if you are sure:

This is so that you can stop the process if it's accidental.  If you did in fact intend to inactivate this user, just click "OK".  From then on, they won't show up on your roster or anywhere else on the website except in the reports for auditing purposes. Don't worry if they come back, though:  they're still in the database and we can bring them back at any time.

Have a question or suggestion for a feature?  Leave us a comment and let us know what we can do to make TherapyLog better for you.

~Ethan

Better messaging on the calendar

I got an email this morning from Sandy Holterfield (Special School District) and as a result of our discussion I realized that the warning messages displayed on the therapy calendar were a little confusing.  You see, on our calendar page, we have all the days of the current month and a few others from the preceeding and following months at the edges:

Those days outside the month are for all intents and purposes disabled.  You have to change the calendar over to the actual month containing the day in question in order to access it.  This was enforced by an error condition that gave the following message:

Although accurate, the message doesn't actually convey what you need to do to see the day in question.  It just says "That date is not part of this month".  A message that vague is not much use to someone who's confused as to why they're seeing it in the first place.  Thus, in order to make the message less confusing, we've adapted something more descriptive:

The message reads "You have clicked on a date outside of the currently selected month. To view appointments on this date, change the 'Month' field at the top of the calendar to move the calendar to the desired month instead, or use the arrows at the top of the calendar to move forward or backward one month."  I think this should help anyone confused on this page better figure out what the next step is to get at the information they want.  Thanks for bringing it to our attention, Sandy.

See something else on our app that you think could be confusing to others?  Leave us a comment and let us know, we're always happy to try to make things easier.

~Ethan

Our Fault!

A bug on our website was caught by Eileen Kane (North Kansas City) this week, so I just wanted to post to let everyone know about it.  The "Single Event Report" for therapists is a quick way to get all the relevant information from one single appointment.  However, it wasn't working properly and we didn't know it.  Over the summer there were some changes made to the system so that therapists would be able to document their transactions goal-by-goal rather than all at once, and those changes were not reflected in this report.  Luckily, Eileen brought the oversite to our attention, and it has been corrected.  You now should be able to access all the documentation information, by goal, from the single event report.  Thanks, Eileen!

If you have other glitches that you've found, or just an idea for a feature or improvement, let us know!  We'd love to hear from you.

False Alarm

Ladies and Gentlemen, an announcement:

I am not in London.

I have attended no seminar.

My wallet was not stolen.

I don't need any money.


Apparently some hacker got a-hold of my email account, and sent out an email to every person on my email list indicating that I needed help getting home.  That means every person I've ever written an email to (including any therapist who's ever contacted me with a question) got this strange email.  Thanks to everyone who contacted me with concern, but everything is ok.  I've reset my authentication information for pretty much every account I have anywhere online, and no one should be getting any more fake messages.

Sorry for the confusion,

~Ethan

Too Many Alerts!

We've released a new feature today in order to solve the "flow" problem that some therapists have been having with the home page.  Everyone already know that when you're on your home page, you see a list of appointments that are in the past and need to be documented off to the right.  These alerts are there to remind you what still needs to be done, and they look like this:

We were proud of this idea when it was first deployed, but some therapists have been wanting more.  This email came to me yesterday from Marisa Pennington (St. Louis Public Schools):


"I really like the improvements that you have made to the therapylog 2.0. I do have some suggestions. When documenting the appointments on the calendar, the computer automatically returns to the home page. I think it would be helpful that after you document one session, it immediately returns to the calendar page on the date you are looking at. Right now, it returns to the homepage, and then I have to click on the calendar, click on the day, then click on the time. Only to have to go through all this again when I move to the next students. Even when I click on the name from the homepage (the following events need to be documented), it still returns home after that event has been documented. Then I have to click on the next group, bring up the calendar, and then document. I think it would flow much easier if we could move to the next session/students automatically without having to return to the homepage. I have used some programs with a wizard that allows you to move forward and/or backwards to document an event. Also, I think it would be helpful if we can see more of the events that need to be documented on the homepage. Or at least an option to "view all." Right now, if I want to document an event that is past the ones allowed on the screen, I have to go to the calendar to view the event. These are just some suggestions and feedback. I think that it would make things flow a lot easier and take out some unnecessary steps. Thanks."

There are some good points there. Most importantly, that the flow for documenting appointments that were too far down the list to see was a little too long, since the user had to click back through the calendar every time.  However, we didn't want to go with having the documentation page redirect back to the calendar because it might be that the user would not want to be documenting in date order but rather by all the appointments for one student or one group, etc.  As I thought about these concerns, and the suggestion that Marisa gave for a "view all" option, a new plan came together that is now live on the website.  The first part is the new "View All" link that is available when you have more than 10 alerts on your homepage:

When you click that link, you're taken to a different page that shows you up to 150 alerts at a time, more than most people will ever have in their backlog.  That page looks like this:

The important thing about this is that if you use the "View all" page to document from, than when you finish documenting an appointment it will take you right back to this page rather than to the homepage, so that you don't have to click through the calendar every time when documenting more recent appointments.

Thanks for the feedback Marisa! And to anyone else out there who has an idea, let us know!  We're always willing to try to work with you to make your work easier.  Just leave us a comment, and you could be the one to give us the idea for our next improvement!

~Ethan

Crowded Reports and what we can do about it

With the addition of many accounts to our system for the SDAC program,  our administrators have been telling us that their reports are now showing many accounts that are just not relevant to their direct billing purposes.  We don't want the data quality of our reports to fall, so for all you administrators we've made the necessary adjustments.  Your reports should now only contain those user accounts that are held by a provider of direct therapy.  Do you have other ideas about how to make our reports more relevant to your work?  Let us know by leaving a comment!

Protecting you from Accidents

When we redesigned our online calendar this year for therapy, there were some things we added, and some we took away. One of the things we tried to do was make everything take "as few clicks as possible", in order to conserve your time and make your work as a therapist as efficient as we could. However, this approach has caused at least one of our users some trouble. In the case of deleting appointments off of the calendar, we were no longer forcing users to click through a "confirmation" before doing the delete because we didn't want to add the extra click if we didn't have to. The feedback is telling us now, though, that we did in fact have to. The following is from Cindy deMendoza (St. Louis Public Schools):


"Hello Mr. Vizitei,

I would like to thank Colin for such a nice orientation to the new version. He was at SLPS last week and suggested that I email you and let you know how much I really like AND NEED the warning box when I am about to delete an entry off my calendar day. The new red button just immediately zaps it off without asking me if I am sure, like it did last year. Today I finally did make the mistake of erroneously deleting a kid that I was trying to document on, the white page icon right next to the red x. oops. I hit wrong button. So, I thought I should go ahead and mention this, like Colin said to. 

Cindy deMendoza, OT, SLPS"


We realized that this was actually one of those "extra steps" that was HELPFUL rather than getting in the way, so we did as she asked and added the feature again. So now when you click on this:

You'll see this:

And you'll have the chance to change your mind before anything actually happens.

Thanks for the feedback, Cindy!

As for anyone else, if you have other ideas for how to improve our product, let us know! We'd love to hear from you. Just leave a comment below!

~Ethan

SDAC Q4, 2009

After taking a few days to recover, I'm pleased to announce that the forms for SDAC 2009 Q4 have shipped. We had a lot of work to do last week to get everything prepared, including some long nights and the consumption of a lot of office supplies, but it's all in the hands of the US Postal Service now. Since the forms were sent on Saturday, if you are an SDAC coordinator you may already have received your package, and if you're interested in doing more and staying on top of your SDAC forms this quarter you'll be interested to try out our new online SDAC Management features that we'll be rolling out this quarter (More to come on that in future posts).

For now, we in the development office will be looking forward to adding a few more tweaks and improvements to the direct services website again now that we have some time again before the next quarter's billing cycle comes around. If you've got new ideas or requests for therapylog.com, leave a comment and let us know. More news as it arises!

~Ethan

Tracking Student Progress

There's a new feature for all you therapists who are making use of the "Quantitative Progress" fields when documenting. If you don't know what that is, look at the screenshot below:

 

 That section to the right of the goal asks for "__ out of __ " so it can establish a percentage to associate with that goal for this session.  This was a feature many therapists asked for back at the end of the last school year.  Now that it's here, some therapists have been wanting to take it further by finding ways to analyze this data so they can derive some meaning out of it.  For example, this morning Mary Holzum (Jackson R-II) came to us with an email asking for a new report:

"Ethan,
Here's what I want:
  Each student's goal worked on and total percentage for that goal over
a certain time."

Well, that seemed like a reasonable request to us.  Thanks to Mary, all therapists now have a new report available on their reports page called the "Student Progress Summary" report.  It's available as the second report from the top of the page, if you're a therapist.  See the screenshot below to help find it:

This new report (available both as a spreadsheet, or as a PDF file) gives you every student on your caseload (or just one, if you select it), shows every one of the student's goals in a table, and calculates a total percentage for the time period you selected based upon the quantitative progress you've recorded for that student. Thanks for the suggestion, Mary!

Like what you see?  Have an idea for another report? let us know in the comments.

~Ethan

New Choices for Lesson Plans

Continuing our release of the new PDF lesson plan formats, we've had some feedback that's fallen into two camps. Some therapists like the new PDF format and want even more detailed information, while others want less information that's more high-level so that they only have to print a couple pages. Both points are valid, and we didn't see any way forward that would make both groups happy with one format.  Instead, we've decided to do both. Over lunchtime today (September 15, 2009), we'll be releasing a new version of the codebase that gives you two choices for how you want to print your lesson plan. Here's a screenshot of the new day planner view:

You can see there are now two buttons for printing where there used to be one.  The "Detailed" lesson plan gives a place for in-time and out-time, and for quantitative progress, with a big space below for notes.  The "Condensed" lesson plan (created with input from Carrie Key (Special School District)), is more compact, containing just goal information, with a space for notes next to it, hopefully cutting down on the number of pages.  Have more ideas for how to refine these formats to be even better?   Let us know in the comments!

~Ethan

2.0 Growing Pains

Overall, the release of TherapyLog 2.0 went very smoothly. There was one issue, however, that did plague us for a little while , and now that it's resolved I just wanted to put out a public service announcement to let everyone know about the issue, and about what was done to fix it.

PDF Lesson Plans

One thing that many of our users told us last year was that they felt like they just couldn't use the printable lesson plan. "We'd like to", they'd say, "but the information is so badly formatted and improperly proportioned that it's just not usable".

Well, dissatisfaction is not acceptable in our office. Ideally (in my software-developer mind), no one would have to use paper for anything, but some therapists really want to have that lesson plan sheet with them to keep notes on, and if that's something that's critical to the therapists than it's critical to us. So we thought about what we could do to make lesson plans easier for therapists to print reliably; we tried better formatting for our web page and more restrictive margins, but because of different screen resolutions, different operating systems, and different browsers, it just proved to be too tough to get a format that looked good for EVERYone. Then we had an idea: if we made these lesson plans PDF files instead of web pages, the standardization of the format would mean we could get everything (student info, goals, activities, etc) into that file with pixel-perfect formatting that would be the same no matter what browser you downloaded it from.

So we ripped out all the code that did lesson plan generation and re-wrote it from scratch to make it generate a PDF file. We were really proud of this when our first batch of therapists started using this new feature, but there was a problem: Internet Explorer 7 users were unable to get anything to happen when they tried to print their lesson plans.

Fortunately, it didn't take us long to find the problem. IE7 doesn't recognize PDF files as downloadable unless you include special indicators called "headers" to let it know. Since we're a Firefox office, we never ran into a problem. Thanks to the feedback and diagnostic information from Christina Finazzo (Special School District), Anna Bembower (St Louis Public Schools), Donna Brown (Spokane), Emiliya Fradkina (St Louis Public Schools), and Martha Polen (Cape Girardeau), we were able to isolate, test and fix the bug before it had any widespread effects. It always pays to let us know as soon as there's a problem, since that means we can get it fixed that much quicker.

Keep that feedback coming, and let us know if there's anything we can do to make your work flow easier. We can't promise to do it all, but we do promise to listen to and consider any idea or suggestion that our users have. If we can't do it, we'll at least let you know why and what other routes we could take to solve the same problem.

~Ethan

Welcome to Therapy(B)log!

It's about time we started blogging! Many therapists have been using therapylog.com for over a year now, but we've been somewhat reserved about our web-presence, mostly taking feedback by email and phone. After all, keeping therapylog.com current and improving takes a lot of effort!

But the time has come to take a new step forward. This blog will serve as the new place for us to disseminate information, answer common questions, and collect feedback from our users. We're always open to making our product better, so leave a comment telling us what you like and what you'd change!

We want to keep growing as a national software vendor to make medicaid easy, and we can't do it without your help.

~Ethan

Launch of Therapylog 2.0

The latest release of therapylog.com is now live, and after lots of testing and fixing, we're pleased to say we're pretty proud of it!

We took our utilitarian site from last year and gave it a total visual overhaul, using a pleasing theme and intuitive icons to make the whole experience more enjoyable (less painful?). :)

On top of just making the site LOOK better, we also did a lot to accommodate the feedback we got from therapists using the system last year.

You wanted to document your progress for every goal rather than all at once: DONE!

You asked if you could have your questions answered for you right there on the page rather than going to the FAQ page: YOU GOT IT!

You said you wanted to add as many goals to a service as you could possibly want: ACCOMPLISHED!

You suggested that you might like to get your lesson plan as a PDF to make printing it easier: NO PROBLEM!

You mentioned you might like to just have all the scheduling, therapy, and documentation happen automatically while the therapist relaxed and drank the sweet coffee drink of their choice: TOO BAD!

Sorry, even we aren't THAT good.

Nevertheless, check out the screencast Charvel did below, and then leave a comment to let us know what you think of the new design!