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