Justin's Blog

Indeed, today was a very good day!

Firstly, Calum got a letter offering him a place to study for a Bachelor of Music in Trumpet Performance at Western Connecticut.  Given how much we liked the place we all very excited (the rather generous scholarship offer doesn’t hurt either!).  Now when he goes to do his final auditions at a few more schools he can relax knowing he has a place he really wants there in his back pocket.

The I had the honour and privilege to be on the selection committee for a new Jazz Ensemble Director at Wolcott High School.  It was a very interesting process to be part of with some great candidates.  I’m really looking forward to seeing what the person we chose does over the coming months.

And then, to cap the day off, I got home to find out that Siraya’s bathroom was finally ready for her to use!  This has been about 2 years in the planning with a couple of months of building.  The guys who builtit have been great (they still have a bit to go, I’ll post the full story when they are completely done).

Not a bad way to start a weekend that will end at our National Conference.

:: Justin ::

If you are coming to our National Conference next week (and I certainly hope you are) and you are arriving on Monday, be sure to look for us and say hi.

We’ll be in the hotel all day for some internal meetings (we’re so virtual and distributed that this is about the only time we all get together).

We should be done by 4 o’clock, so if you are around after that, we’d love to get together and talk Therap.

:: Justin ::

If the title of this post doesn’t make any sense to you, you probably don’t do any electronic Medicaid billing.

If you do, you will know that when you do electronic billing through Therap, the file that we send off on your behalf is called an 837.

Once you claim has been processed you will then receive back another file called an 835.

Probably the most important muber in the 835 is the TCN (in some states it is called an ICN) number.  This is the number assigned by your Medicaid processor to your claim.  By having this number we can then directly link the claim you have in Therap to the claim Medicaid has at their end.  This means that should your rates change and those rates be backdated we will probably be able to make that change semi-automatically for you and save you an awful lot of work and heartache.

Not only that, but you will have access to the payment status of your claims and a whole bunch more reports.

Even if your 835 includes claims not processed through Therap, we will still store them and keep the accessible for you as well as matching up the claims we did process.

Want to know more?  We’ve have a whole track on billing at our National Conference next week.  See you there!

:: Justin ::

For Therap user in New York, we are very excited to be moving into the next phase of IRMA implementation.

You should have received the following email from OPWDD.

If you didn’t be sure to get in touch.

I am the OPWDD project manager for the IRMA Voluntary File upload project and have been given your contact info from Therap Services. OPWDD has been working with Therap on developing a process to upload the incident data recorded in your system and share it with the Incident Report and Management Application (IRMA). This will alleviate the need to perform duplicate entries of incidents in both systems.

We are now entering the user testing phase of the project and will need your assistance. Each agency has to designate a tester to test the file upload functionality. Here is the plan going forward for the initial round of testing:

1) Please email me the IRMA user name and email address of the person who will be responsible for testing the file upload process. This user should already have access to IRMA and I will assign them the ‘File Upload’ functionality from TBSW. Please do not submit a new user who does not currently have IRMA access.

2) Once the individual has been indentified and the file upload functionality applied from TBSW, I will email the user that they can begin testing once the testing window opens. Currently, we are looking at the agency test window to begin in mid/late February 2012.

3) Testing will have the user upload incident data in the form of an XML document with add/mod/delete actions which allows the Therap incident data to interact with the master IRMA database. The data being transferred over is not permanent in the testing phase. IMS has a process in place that allows the uploaded data to interact with IRMA data, but at 7:00 each night, the test transactions will be rolled back and removed from the system. This will cause the ‘Summary of Incidents’ page to display erroneous totals as it accounts for the test data being uploaded.

o Incidents uploaded through the file upload process cannot be modified through IRMA during the testing phase. During the testing phase all data uploaded through the file upload will be removed daily at 7:00 pm. If uploaded incident data is modified using IRMA during the testing phase, this will create discrepancies between the agencies incident data and IRMA data as they will not be synchronized.

This is a general overview of the process and a more detailed presentation of the user testing phase will be provided before the test window becomes live. IMS is currently developing training overview sessions that will be presented with a WebEx connection to walk the testers through the testing process for mid February. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.

Thank you,

Scott Grabicki
OPWDD-IMS

:: Justin ::

If there is one thing we have a lot of here at Therap, it’s data. Whenever possible and appropriate we try and make decisions based on it.

One of these choices that we have been working on recently is when to take the system down for updates.

If you don’t work third shift and you don’t work weekends, you may think that Therap basically never goes down. Unfortunately life isn’t that simple. There are a range of reasons that we may need to take the system down (usually for 15 minutes to half an hour) to post an update to the application or bring up new equipment.  Thankfully the list of reasons that we might have to do this is actually shriking as we develop new tools that allow us to do rolling updates which require no downtime.

If you think about our last major release, (Therap 2012.0) which we released on January 15th.  Well, we din’t have to release 2012.0.1 until yesterday!  If you go back and look at our previous releases (please don’t look too hard at Therap 9.0) you will see that in the days and weeks following there we numerous releases.

Despite this significant progress and all the steps we are continuing to make to improve things, it doesn’t make it much fun if you are the one who is working when we take the system down.  In particular, if you are regularly scheduled to be working around 4:25am eastern on Sundays each week, the chances of you being impacted by downtime increase enormously.

There is no perfect time to bring the system down as people are always logged in.  Add in the complications of Time Zones (from Eastern, to Pacific, to Alaska, to Hawaii, and even adding Europe) and picking the right time is not easy.  Interestingly the peak times for data entry and data retreival are different, peaks (and troughs) are also different for different modules.  We have looked at all of this (on a minute to minute level) and tried to come up with the best timing we can.

There are also going to be times where we can’t use the optimal slot for a number of reasons, but whenever we do take the system down, we do it knowing that we are causing invonvenience, but also that we are doing something to make the system better and more stable.   

Whenever it is possible we try to give ample notice of this downtime, but when something goes wrong we don’t always get much notice ourselves.

So, if you are one of those folks who works weekend night shifts, please accept my apologies and know that we are always doing our best to get you back to work as soon as we can.

:: Justin ::

Allison has just published the latest list of Certified Trainer Wedinars.

This is your chance to listen in to experienced users from around the country talk about how they use Therap.

Here’s a sample of what’s on offer:

Just click on a link to sign up

You can also find out more about becoming a Therap Certified Trainer here.

We have a list of all of our trainers here.

:: Justin ::

We’re now moving into the next phase of Calum’s journey to college.

Having applied to to 8 colleges, he now has auditions at five of them over the next month.  It’s all new to me having only done this with an engineer who fell in love with the first school she visited.

Today we were at Western Connecticut State University.  I was very impressed, by the atmosphere, the faculty, and the fact that a professor recognised by Hearts shirt!

They are also in the process of building a very impressive new facility:

Tomorrow we’re off to do the same at The Hartt School of Music.

Does one tell a trumpeter to “break a finger”?

:: Justin ::

We have published an update to the National Conference schedule.

This one has quite a few changes in it, so be sure to take a look.  One thing to be sure that you remember is that we have so many sessions they don’t all fit on one page.  Be sure to check out the full schedule.

There will be a few more minor changes, I hope to get them out over the weekend.

It’s looking like we will have more than 300 people attending the conference representing more than 100 agencies from more than 35 states.

It’s going to be a great time, if you haven’t signed up yet, get on with it!

:: Justin ::

8:55pm Eastern

We are experiencing some systems just now.

We are working hard on it as I write.

I’ll update things as soon as I know more.

:: Justin ::

9:05pm Eastern

One of our many application servers is experiencing issues.  If you get an error on logging in, you should log out and try again.  We are working to get that server up and running again

9:15pm Eastern

Everything should be back to normal.  Thanks for hanging with us

I am delighted to welcome Jordan Mar as the latest Therap team member. She will be working primarily with our Mid-West team, but as is the case with all of us, you never kknow where she will show up. Obviously your first chance to say hi will be at the National Conference in a week or two.

Jordan has been involved with supporting people with disabilities from her high school days. While she was studying at the Lincoln Northeast High School, she used to support an elementary school student requiring extra support during her lunchtime, twice a week. She moved to Utah after graduating from high school and stated working for a school for kids with special needs called Dan Peterson where she worked in a classroom with some teenage students who had communication barriers. During that time she also worked for Rise doing in home support for children and adults with special needs who were in a family setting. She also helped run a summer program for Rise and did respite care on the weekends.

During her college days, Jordan worked in public schools as an early childhood special education paraprofessional working mainly with 3-5 year olds who had autism or other developmental disabilities. After working back in the schools for a year and a half she participated in a Management Training Program through Developmental Services of Nebraska. She also assisted with two group homes in Nebraska; one was a home for young boys with autism and the other was a home for men who were considered to be high risk to the community. After completion of the program, Jordan moved to Kansas City, Missouri where she was the Residential Supervisor for five homes in the Kansas City area.

Jordan went to the University of Nebraska to pursue a degree in education and is currently working on completing her degree in Early Childhood Education through the distance education program provided by the University of Nebraska.

:: Justin ::