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!

Little things matter

Just this week we got a request from one of our users in the Spokane school district, Donna Brown:


It would really help me out if students somehow appeared in alphabetical order, especially on the reports. It seems they just appear in the order maybe that I added them to the system, but when I print a report for all of my students to do my progress reports from, it takes forever to search for the student that I am currently working on. Thanks, Donna 


Not wanting to bite off more than we could chew, here's where we started:


Donna,

That seems quite reasonable.  Which report are you specifically referring to?  Let me know and I'll see what we can do to alphabetize it.

~Ethan

She was quick to get back to us with a reply:

Progress summary is the one I use most often in this way---even when just wanting to print the report for one student, the drop down list just seems to have them listed in random order so that you have to search for the student there as well.

Thanks

Loud and clear!  We got the message, and now we've taken care of it.  The student progress summary report is now alphabetized, both when selecting which student to run it on, and when looking at multiple students within the report. Thanks for the suggestion Donna!

~Ethan

Warning! a helpful note

 Back in November (quite a while ago, time flies doesn't it?) we got a request from Sandy Holterfield who's one of our most helpful therapists:


would it be possible to get a warning if you have marked the therapy as individual and then have more than 1 student in the time slot. I know I have done this by accident. It would have to be just a warning and not a total lock out as sometimes you schedule several but end up with just 1. I'm loving some of the changes! 
-Sandy Holterfield


At the time, I thought it was a great idea, but we've had a ton of development going on in therapylog and I just never found the time to schedule work on it.  However, with summer approaching, we're getting just a bit more breathing room, so I'm now happy to announce that this has finally been put into place.  From today forward, if you select an "Individual" therapy and accidentally schedule more than one student for it, you'll see this message:

it's kind of hard to see on this screen shot, but what is says is "WARNING: You have multiple students scheduled for an INDIVIDUAL therapy type".  This isn't a "lock out", so it won't prevent you from scheduling your therapy, just a helpful reminder in case that's not what you meant to do.  Thanks for the suggestion, Sandy!

how about a date?

Around two weeks ago, we got a great suggestion from one of our therapists:

I love that this program presents an option for us to view the progress of our students in graph form. I would love it even more and highly suggest therapylog incorporate specific dates within its graphical formats for the progress of students. Thank you, Mindy Zucchini M.S. CCC-SLP 


At first I was confused, after all we do have date information available on those progress graphs, so I wrote back:


Mindy,

Hey there, I'm glad you like the progress feature!  I think currently if you hover over a data point, it should give you a little box that tells you the date the data point is for.  Does that cover what you're looking for, or do you have something else in mind? 

~Ethan

I thought that might be the end of it, but Mindy pointed out something really obvious that I'd just never thought about:

HI Ethan,

Thank you for your email and quick response to my inquiry. You're right, if I hover over the graph, the date is viewable on this program. However, the date is not on the graph when it is printed.

Thanks,
Mindy

She was right!  We had these great graphs, and they let you see your students progress by date, and they let you print them off, but once they printed there was no way to tell what point was for what date anymore!

We couldn't let such a glaring hole in the system stand, so as of today we've made a step in what we think is the right direction.  We don't know if it will perfectly suit your needs, but thats why we want you to try it out...So you can let us know!

Here's what the graphs look like now (as you can see, the dates are visible now at the bottom of the graph):

Thanks for the suggestion Mindy!

Hey reader, do YOU have a suggestion for something on therapylog you'd like to see improved?  Let us know!  It's our job to make this website as useful as possible, and we can only do that when we know what you want!

~Ethan

Copying full Days of Therapy, and how we keep you speedy

As a therapist, I'm sure you already use our day copying feature.  If you have a day full of therapy this week, and it's basically going to be the same next wednesday, we give you the ability to just copy all the scheduling data from one day to the other so that you don't have to go through all the work of scheduling that again.  We think it's a great help!

But here's the problem.  The average page request on our system takes a little less than 1/2 a second (that's how long it takes between when you click on something and when you get to the next page).  Because of how much data there can be when copying one day to another, that can take sometimes 7 or 8 seconds to get all the data moved.  It's a long time to have our system locked up when there are other users trying to access other pages.  So, we've worked on a comprimise that we think will give you the same copying feature, but good performance for everyone else at the same time.  Here's how it works:

Here I have a day of therapy that I want to copy:

When I click Copy Day, it takes me to this form:

I pick what day I want to copy to, (or which two days, in this case), and click Copy, and the copying is sent off to our background queue (which doesn't affect the performance on the website), while you go back to the calendar.  If you look at any of those days before the copying is complete, you'll see this message:

There you can see that the copying is still going on. You can go copy a different day or do something else on the website while this is happening.  After about 30-60 seconds, if you come back to any of those days, you'll see that the copying is done:

And everything is back to normal!

We're always looking for ways to make our website more useful (and less slow), so if you have ideas or suggestions, we'd love to hear them!  Leave us a comment and we'll get back to you letting you know what we think we can do to make your feature idea happen.

Help is on the way!

Over the last two years, your suggestions and feedback have helped us grow into a company with a lot of software (and a lot of demands for modifications to that software).  It's been getting tougher for our team to keep up, so starting in the month of May we've brought on a new hand to help spread the load around.

This is Tyler, and he's in our offices helping to make all the changes that you keep asking us for.  Tyler, you want to introduce yourself?

"I grew up in Springfield and have always been considered what most would call a geek, I've always had a strong desire to figure out how things work and improve them. This passion for learning and technical ability led me to Mizzou for a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering as well as my current pursuit of a M.S. in the same field.  I also have some insight into the field of counseling through my mother who has worked for several school districts in the Springfield area first as a special needs instructor then as a primary counselor."


We've found Tyler to be a great fit, and as we continue on you may find him communicating directly with those of you who are continuing to push our product into the next version (be nice, he's new!).  Welcome, Tyler, we're happy to have you!

Permanent Reports!

So here's a problem we've heard complaints about over and over again:  therapists want to have long-term access to their reports!  In the past, though, this just hasn't been possible through therapylog.com.  We only have so much server space, so we've always had a policy of deleting all generated reports every sunday to make sure we don't run out of storage space for new ones.

Well, that problem is now in the past.  Thanks to some long work from all members of our development team over the past few months, new reports from 4/14/2010 and onwards will be stored off-site to be available to you for as long as you want them.  They don't disappear until you press the "delete" link for that report on your homepage.  The reports links in your homepage and in your email will now point to an s3.amazonaws.com address rather than the "therapylog.com" one you're used to seeing because we're using amazon's storage service to keep these documents stored for us indefinitely.

Thanks to everyone who made this suggestion for being persistent, and know that although sometimes it can take a while to get these large infrastructure requests handled, we always try not to let them get buried under the constant pressure of things that need to be done right now.

We always love hearing from our users, so if you have an idea for changes to therapylog, we want to hear what you have to say!  Leave us a comment here on the blog, or you can always email us through your normal customer support channels.

~Ethan

Two small things, but take note

Over this last weekend, I received two requests for small changes that I thought were worth mentioning here on the blog.  These shouldn't largely affect how you do business, but they're important to know about:

1) In the past we've used a "Consult Only" flag on caseload records to indicate a student that was not to be billed for. That worked really well, but in the case of one of our therapists, she was providing services for a student for one year, and then after an IEP meeting the student became "consult only". That's normal, but in therapylog.com by marking the flag to say "this student is consult only for me", it prevented her from having any services from last year billed. I've made this flag into a date field so that now, as a therapist, when editing a caseload record you actually indicate the DATE that the consult only transition took place. All services before that date will be billed normally, all after will not. See the screenshot below.

2) When adding a student to your caseload, you usually just type the name in and pick from a list of matching students. For performance issues, we've limited the results set in the name finder to 5 names. One of our therapists, though, was having trouble because her district has 6 kids with the same first and last name, and the one she wanted to add wasn't showing up (because we only show 5 results). In order to combat this, I've increased the max to 7. See the following screenshot:

Do you have another little thing that's bothering you that you'd like to see fixed?  Hey, that's what we're here for!  Let us know, we're usually willing to make these little adjustments pretty quickly.

~Ethan

Your Day Planner and Safari

If you're a therapist using a Mac as your computer of choice, you may be using the "Safari" web browser.  Although we prefer Firefox or Chrome, Safari is a great browser, so no problem there. What does happen from time to time is that things look a little different in some browsers than others. For example, it was brought to our attention this morning that the day planner was looking a little strange for some mac users. Namely, it looked something like this:

That's certainly not what we want, to have the hour blocks cut off half way across the screen.  The way it's supposed to look is the way it does in the other major browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome, and IE):

Thankfully, once we found out about the problem, it was pretty easy to get it fixed so that your day planner shows up in the right place now no matter what the browser.

Although we do our best to keep things looking the same in all four major players in the browser market, sometimes we miss things, so if you see something that seems out of whack to you, let us know.  We can usually get it fixed the same day!

~Ethan

Better Visibility for Direct Services Admins

If you are a direct services administrator for therapylog.com, you may remember back when you used to be able to look over an entire month of work for your therapists on the calendar interface at once.  Last week, we had to remove that feature because the amount of data getting pulled back and forth was too much for the server to reasonably handle.  In a way, that's a good sign because it means more and more people are storing their all their data with therapylog rather than just doing their billing through it.

However, although we didn't think the administrators would miss this interface, we were wrong about that. Both Beth Michaelis (North Kansas City) and Jodie Noe (Malden) let us know that they made use of the calendar regularly for seeing which therapists were completing their appointments and where their unbillables might be.

We think it's a great thing for the administrators to have that level of visiability into the system, so they can just browse through and see where there might be problems, so we decided to give them another way to do that which wouldn't be so taxing on our infrastructure.  After conversing with both of them via email and pitching an idea or two, this is what we came up with:

On the "Admin Tools" tab on the homepage, there's a new button labeled "Direct Services"

This is where we plan on storing any tools that specifically have to do with administering direct services billing programs.  As we come up with new and better ways for you to monitor and intervene in the work flow, they will be added on the toolbox that you are taken to when you click that button:

As you can see, right now we only have one tool (one feature at a time), and it's the one we're interested in right now.  The "Day Tracker" is the new direct services tool for checking any given day for incomplete appointments or unbillables, without having to run a report.  Clicking on that button takes you here;

[PHOTO REDACTED]

This is the Day Tracker.  Inspired by the things that Beth and Jodie told us they needed, this is how you can check any day for anomalies.  The form at the top there is a standard day picker.  Just type in the date you want to look at, or use the visual calendar control that's built in with it by clicking on the text box, and click "Change Date" to see all incompletes/unbillables for any date you want.

Below that form are two tabs, one that says "Incomplete Appointments", and one that says "Unbillable Appointments".  The incomplete one comes up by default, and it shows you every appointment for that day which the therapist has yet to complete their documentation for.  If someone forgets or gets behind, you'll be able to see that here so you can remind them before it slips too far into the past.

By clicking on the "Unbillable Appointments" tab, you're taken to this view:

This is a listing of all the appointments that are fully documented (that is, the therapist has completed them), and are for medicaid eligible kiddos, but we cannot bill them for one reason for another.  Want to know what those reasons are without running a report?  Just click on the appointments you're interested in and watch the unbillable reasons appear:

[PHOTO REDACTED]

Investigate as many as you like.  Once you're satisfied, you can click on that appointment again to close the reasons.  It's that simple.

This is just the beginning of what we can do at therapylog.com to keep you in tune with your therapists progress. Have other ideas or suggestions? Let us know.  We're always interested in making your workflow better.

~Ethan

Send in the Subs

We've had more than a couple therapists come to us with a problem.  Specifically, they don't know what to do about subs and student teachers:

"We still want to track our goal data, but we can't have it be billed to medicaid because substitute and student teachers aren't eligible for that"


One of the suggestions that came up was a new service code that would allow you to say "I have a sub working on this, so don't bill medicaid, but here's the progress data".  We haven't had anything like that before, and so far we've been only asking for goals on services that are billable, but we don't want things like this to get in the way of therapists enjoying our site and feeling like therapylog.com is useful.

So, as of today I've personally restructured the service scheduling form to ask for goals on any service that is THERAPY (regardless of whether it's billable or not).  This in conjunction with the new service code (Substitute/Student Teacher, see screenshot below) should make your request a reality.  The new service code is not billable, so anything you record under it will NEVER get sent to medicaid, but it's still a THERAPY code, so it allows you to track goals and progress just like any other piece of billable therapy (so you can get those nice graphs on your caseload page to include the data your subs and student teachers collect).

Like most of our enhancements, this doesn't do anything for US.  We don't make any more money because you can now record more non-medicaid data.  Our value comes from making YOU happy as our users, because if you like and can recommend our service, we'll continue to grow.

So if you have something you need that isn't there, something that bothers you that you wish would go away, or just an idea about a little change that would make your workflow easier, don't hesitate to leave me a comment.  I'd love to hear from you.

~Ethan

SDAC Costs and their Collection

One of the biggest things that holds up SDAC Medicaid claims is the calculation and validation of your district's costs.  At therapylog, we've seen the problem.  Who do you send them to?  Are you sure they got there?  Will you need to submit a justification for the differences from last year?  What were last years costs anyway?  How do you know that your reasons for cost differentials will be accepted?

Now, we're showing you what we've done to try and ease this process for you.  This post is directed towards SDAC coordinators, so if that's you check out what we have in store:

See that screenshot?  That's the new cost management screen.  It's the next step that comes after your time study is complete (Step 4).  The top form allows you to upload your cost calculation sheets directly to us, and right there you can see which files you've already uploaded (so you know we have them).  Don't remember which files you sent?  Click their name to download a copy of the file you sent us (so you know we got the right one).  Need to submit another file?  You can send as many as you want, and they'll all be listed there for you.

And that second table below shows what we currently have on file for your cost totals (Along with the totals we have on file for the same quarter last year).  If you still have 0's in those boxes for your quarter, just hit the "Edit Costs" button for the current year, and you'll be take to this form:

Here you can see a form that lets you enter in your salaries and fringe costs for the quarter, and it immediately calculates your differential right there on the screen so you can see the change since last year.  Green means the difference is within acceptable limits.  If it goes beyond 5%:

  
You'll be shown immediately, so that you can submit your justifications NOW, not in 6 weeks when medicaid sends it back with questions.  Don't know what to put for your justifications?  Use some of our examples of common justification reasons for cost increases and decreases from the bottom of the screen:

Just Drag-and-Drop them onto the textbox where you want to use them, and they'll become part of your reasoning for your cost difference.  Use one, or as many as you want, and you can always type your own specifics in around the usual reasons to make your point clear.

We are always trying to make therapylog.com a better place for your district and you as a user.  Have other ideas on how we can improve?  Let us know by leaving a comment!  We'd love to hear from you.

~Ethan

Automating the Day Planner

I received a thoughtful email from one of our therapists this morning (Jennifer Huffaker from Special School District, to be precise). She writes:

"Whenever you submit an entry it always closes the day planner and bring you back to the home page. Most likely you have many entries to fill when you open the day planner, once you hit submit is there any way to bring you back to the day planner and that day you were working on as oppose to bring you back to the home page, clicking calendar and then clicking your day again?"


Our response?  Great idea!  Anyway that we can get rid of any extra clicks is favorable in our eyes.  So, in that light, we've automated the day planner to be a little more proactive.  Now, when you login to your calendar, in direct answer to Jennifer's request, when you schedule a new service it will take you right back to the day planner for the day it was scheduled for, so you can save time when scheduling many services on one day:

Thanks for the idea, Jennifer!


Do you have thoughts or ideas about ways to make therapylog.com better?  Let us know, it's our job to make your  online experience easier.


~Ethan

A Quick Fix for the Student Progress Report

We noticed a problem today when one of our users called in to ask about a few of our reports.  Namely, the "Student Progress Report" (first report on the list, for therapists) was not producing the "progress" column at all.  Obviously, this limited the usefulness of this report.  :)

If you're interested in the reason why this failure occurred, I'll give a brief explanation:  We used to only collect progress information for each student at an appointment once.  Some of our therapists came to us and said that they really needed to be able to track progress seperately for each goal.  We knew that this was an important feature, so we changed our data structures to store progress at the "goal" level rather than at the "appointment" level.  However, this report was still pulling data from the original location, and not coming up with anything.

In any case, I just want everyone to know that the report is once again functioning as we'd expect, displaying all progress data as it should.  Thanks to Sandy Holterfield for bringing that to our attention, we got it fixed as fast as we possibly could.

Notice something that doesn't seem quite right to you? Let us know.  Fixing problems is always our #1 priority.

Grouped Admin Unbillable Reports

For a while now, we've had the ability for administrators to run unbillable reports in order to find out which transactions for their district are not billable to medicaid, and for what reasons.

Unfortunately, I think the interface may have been a little misleading.  You see, there's this selector for most admin reports that allows them to run it only for one "group" of therapists (which are self-defined through another area of the website).  See the interface below:

The problem, though, was that for the unbillable reports, this feature was not "hooked up".  That is to say, it always ran for all therapists regardless of the group selected.  This was brought to our attention by one of our more attentive users, and we're very greatful for that fact.

Point of order:  This was our fault.  We messed it up and should have tested it more carefully when we first launched the "groups" feature to make sure it was being used on all reports properly.  We try not to make mistakes, but when they happen we don't hide them.  We're greatful to our user base when they find things like this for us, and we always try to get them fixed as soon as possible.

In that vein, this post is to announce that this particular oversight is now in the past.  I personally have made sure that each unbillable report will only run for the group selected, as originally intended.

Have you found something that doesn't seem to behave right in therapylog.com?  Let us know!  We're always trying to make our system better, and fixing mistakes is one of the best ways to do that.

~Ethan

Electronic SDAC Launched

Happy 2010 From Therapylog.com

And welcome to a new era of RMS management.  This quarter marks our launch of a 100% online process for managing your SDAC random moment sampling. 

Now, as an SDAC coordinator, instead of keeping tons of paper around your office you can track who's done what with their moments at a glance:

Or, as an SDAC participant, you can get automated email reminders about your moments and just type in the details online instead of keeping track of your specific sheet of paper:

And given that this process is new, we're listening carefully for your feedback so that we can make it even better.  If you're a member of one of the districts that has elected to do your RMS electronically from now on, let us know what you think!  This is new stuff and we want to make whatever changes are necessary to make this process go as smoothly as possible.

~Ethan