Justin's Blog

Today, Calum and I are up in Boston (well, Cambridge actually) for the YMCA New England Swimming Championships.

The weather is absolutely disgusting, I don’t think even Douglas Adams could have words for the amount of rain coming out of the sky. Thankfully, we are in doors in Harvard’s Blodgett Pool (which is huge and a great place to watch from).

Calum has done really well, beating his seeding in both events he swam (the 50 and 100 freestyle) with a best time in the 50.

Anyone got an ark that we could borrow to get home?

:: Justin ::

We have a bunch of great conferences coming up this year.  Make sure that you get signed up early, I’d hate for anyone to miss out.

Also, don’t forget that you can get yourself to a conference for free by earning Therap Points.

:: Justin ::

I had an extremely entertaining conversation today involving all the above.

There might be a Therap Point or two if you can get the link!

:: Justin ::

Have you seen all the stuff that our Therap Certified Trainers group is getting up to?

To start off with, we just expanded the team with the folks above from St John’s Community Services, in Washington DC (you can see the whole group here)

We have now renamed the Customers’ Blog to be the Certified Trainers‘ one, so there is going to be some great stuff going on over there.

On top of that, they are running a whole series of webinars so that you get get on board an pick their brains.  Check list here or click on one of the follow links:

Kris and I had a great day in Oneonta, New York  at a day hosted by Joe and Pat and The Arc Otsego.

This morning we had a tremendous Therap Information Session where we spoke to a bunch of agencies that came to hear about The Arc’s experience with Therap and listen to my presentation.

Then this afternoon we had our Central New York User Group.  Lots of great questions and even better suggestions.

On top of all that, The Arc Otsego earned themselves a ton of Therap Points!

Thanks Pat for being such a great host!

:: Justin ::

As i am sure you noticed, Therap was down for about an 90 minutes in the middle of the day today.

Obviously we are not happy at all with this, any unplanned downtime is bad news for you and hence bad news for us.

You can be assured that as soon as we were aware there was a problem, we had a whole team of folks working on it to get it fixed, as it is now, and we will be doing more diagnosis work over the coming days.

Please accept my apologies for any difficulties that this problem caused.

:: Jusin ::

One of the ways to earn points in the new Therap Points Program is to have a link on your website to ours.

Or, you may want to put a link there so your staff can get to Therap more easily.

We’ve recently updated our button that you can use to do this and even given you the code for your website.

You can take a look here.

A few samples:

:: Justin ::

Using Pivot Tables to analyze and work with your Therap Data

Exporting data to Excel from Therap is easy, but what do you do with it once it gets there?

Justin Brockie of Therap will give a walkthrough on using Pivot Tables to unleash the power of your data and Pete Ratekin of Occazio in New Castle, Indiana will show how he has been able to automate many of these processes

Title: Using Pivot Tables to analyze and work with your Therap Data
Date: Thursday, March 25, 2010
Time: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/439037539

There is a nice article about Therap is today’s Waterbury, CT Republican-American.

Marc Silvestrini did a nice job working out what we do and I am particularly happy with the quotes from families like this:

Here’s the article:

A RESOURCE FOR CAREGIVERS

Service agencies, parents of disabled rave about Web site

BY MARC SILVESTRINI

REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

WATERBURY
James M. Kelly of Woodbury is not only the vice chairman of Waterbury-based Therap Services LLC, he’s also a customer.

Kelly is also president of Commu­nity Options Inc., a Waterbury-based company that operates several group homes and manages day programs for people with developmental dis­abilities. In all, Community Options serves about 290 developmentally disabled clients throughout the state and employs more than 300 people.

Kelly says the services offered by Therap Services have helped Com­munity Options save about $20,000 per year in copying costs.

“That’s a pretty significant sum, especially when you consider that money is pretty tight in the social services field these days, like it is in most industries,” he said.

DIGITAL RECORDS

Therap Services developed and maintains a Web-based information, documentation and communications system for those who provide servic­es to people with developmental dis­abilities.

There are an estimated 4.3 million people in the United States with de­velopmental disabilities, according to Richard Robbins, Therap’s chairman and chief executive officer. The de­velopmentally disabled were previ­ously referred to as mentally retarded.

Therap’s Web-based system en­ables service providers, service man­agers, health professionals, and regulators to log, record and track everything that happens to their de­velopmentally disabled clients, in­cluding the medications they receive, daily staff reports, health summaries, injury reports, and billing informa­tion. The system also helps care providers collaborate and communi­cate with other staff members, state personnel, and a client’s family.

In short, Therap offers care providers an easy, efficient HIPAA­compliant alternative to the immense amount of paperwork and manual record-keeping they would otherwise be obligated to complete.

“We help caregivers record, track and share information about their de­velopmentally disabled clients,” said Justin M. Brockie of Wolcott, the first employee hired by Therap and now the company’s chief operating offi­cer. “We help them report and record everything that happens in the lives of the people they’re caring for.”

The Therap system can track and record everything about a patient from blood glucose levels to blood pressure readings to weight gains and losses, enabling physicians, care­givers and even family members to track and monitor a developmentally disabled person’s care and progress even from remote location, as long as they have access to the Internet.

“We just love it, it’s a great way for us to keep track of what’s going on in our daughter’s life,” said Tom Rose of Cheshire, who, along with his wife, Maureen, uses Therap’s Web site to keep close track of his 25-year-old daughter, who lives in a group home in Middlebury.

“Every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is log into that site to check and see how she’s slept through the night, what she’s been eating, what kinds of activities she’s going to be doing that day,” Rose said. “My wife and I use it all the time. It’s a great way of keeping a close eye on what and how she’s do­ing.”

BANGLADESH AND NEPAL

Therap, which is based in a 4,000­square-foot office on Watertown Av­enue, serves a client base made up of about 400 for-profit, not-for-profit, and state and government agencies in 43 states and two Canadian provinces that service the develop­mentally disabled. Those 400 agen­cies serve about 40,000 clients and employ about 40,000 people, Robbins said.

In three states — Delaware, Montana and North Dakota — all private agen­cies that contract with the state to provide services to the developmen­tally disabled are now required to use forms generated by Therap when they report incidents to the state.

DARLENE DOUTY REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

Waterbury-based Therap Services is the national leader in providing documentation for providers of services to people with developmental disabilities. From left, Therap Services Vice Chairman James M. Kelly, Chief Operating Officer Justin M. Brockie and Chairman Richard A. Robbins.

Therap’s Web-based service is also being used in Bangladesh and Nepal.

The company has about 100 employees worldwide, most of whom are software engineers who design, devel­op and test new software ap­plications. Therap, on the average, revises, improves or updates its software about every six weeks, Kelly said.

“It’s really a very useful and effective tool,” said Stan Soby, vice president of community programs for The Connecticut Institute for the Blind/Oak Hill. “We’re responsible for the well being of a lot of peo­ple and we’re very pleased with the service Therap pro­vides. The response from our care providers and staff mem­bers who use the system every day has been unanimously positive.”

Founded in 1893, Oak Hill serves about 550 blind and disabled adults and children every day in more than 100 locations across the state. It is the largest private nonprofit community provider of serv­ices for people with disabili­ties in Connecticut.

Therap was launched in July 2003, when Robbins and Kelly, old friends who had known and worked with each other on a number of previ­ous business ventures, got to­gether in an attempt to “bring modern technological capa­bilities to the social services field,” Kelly said.

Kelly, a Greater Waterbury native, and Robbins, who is a native of and still lives in New York City, first met in the early 1980s at a sympo­sium in Massachusetts, when both were working with de­velopmentally disabled chil­dren. Today, almost 30 years later, they have teamed up to offer the community that sur­rounds developmentally dis­abled children and adults — their caregivers, their physi­cians and nurses, their fami­lies and loved ones — a new information and communica­tions tool. A tool that helps social service agencies reduce their costs — less paperwork, less time spent in meetings, less time spent on the road driv­ing from facility to facility, reduced administrative time — while providing families of developmentally disabled in­dividuals with faster access to information about their loved ones .

“It’s a wonderful service, it really is,” said Lisette Authi­er of Thompson, who, along with her husband, Rob, uses the Therap system to “keep close tabs” on her develop­mentally disabled sister-in­law. Rob Authier’s sister lives in a group home in Windsor, more than an hour’s drive from Thompson.

“It makes it so much easier for my husband and I to know what’s happening with her and keep an eye on how things are going,” Authier said. “With this system, we always know where she’s go­ing, who she’s seeing, what medications she’s taking…

everything. It’s really pretty neat.”

DARLENE DOUTY REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

From left, James M. Kelly, Richard A. Robbins and Justin M. Brockie of Therap Services have developed a Web site that not only helps social service agencies reduce their costs, but also provides families of developmentally disabled individuals with faster access to information about their loved ones.

:: Justin ::

With the release of Therap 8.9.3 today we have added more functionality to help agencies work with their regulators and achieve compliance with electronic signature rules around the county.  This is another example of functionality developed in conjunction with our users at the Provider Administration Conference.

As many of you know, this is a slightly moving target and one we continue to monitor and work with.

Therap’s latest feature allows you to mandate that staff acknowledge a policy or statement before logging into the system (see below for instructions).  One suggestion is that you have your staff acknowledge that by entering data in Therap they understand that they are electronically signing those documents.  You can choose if they acknowledge once or every time they log into the system.

We based this is a number of documents, including New York State’s Electronic Signatures and Records Act (ESRA) Guidelines quoted below.

3.2.3 Overview of the Business and Legal Function of a Signature
A signature can serve the following business and legal purposes:

1. Demonstrate intent: A signature identifies the signer and signifies that the signer understood and intended to carry out whatever was stipulated in the document.
2. Authentication and approval: A signature authenticates a document by linking the signer with the signed document. A signature may also express the signer’s approval or authorization of the document and what it contains, and his or her intent that it has legal effect. The signature provides evidence that the signer really did something and actually saw and approved a particular document at the time of signing.
3. Security: A signature is often used to protect against fraud, impersonation, or intrusion. For instance, to a limited degree the signature on a check is a form of security because drafting an unauthorized check often requires forging a signature. A signature on a document often imparts a sense of clarity and finality to the transaction and may lessen the subsequent need to inquire beyond the face of a document.
4. Ceremony: The act of signing warns or puts the signer on notice that he or she may be making a legally binding commitment. The signature will show that a meaningful act occurred when the person approved the document. A signature should force the person to deliberate over the document and become aware of its significance before making it final.

Therap achieves these by:

1. By having staff sign off on your statement of intent and/or electronic use/signature policy.
2. Therap’s electronic signature on each page is tied to the user though our three-part log in
3. Therap’s extensive physical, software, hardware, and network security along with the prevention of direct user access to the data protect your signature.  This combined with update and activity tracking ensure that you know exactly who does what in your system.
4. Therap has affirmative save, submit, approve and other buttons on pages.

To create a new Acknowledgment Page, go to Administration Mode and click “New” next to “Signup Agreement”.

You can then create your page and decide whether your staff need to sign just once or every time that they log in.  You will notice that there is also a report here to get a list of who has acknowledged your agreement.

Now, users signing into your account with have to click I agree or they will be taken back to the Login Page:

Of course, while this was designed with Electronic Signatures in mind, you could use the page to have staff sign off on other policies or agreements.

Let me know what you think

:: Justin :