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!