Sunny Oaks, Inc. is a residential provider located in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Quality of life is very good here; we are one hour's drive from the Pacific coast and one hour from the beautiful Cascade mountain range.

We currently serve about 42 individuals residentially and 10 individuals vocationally. Our main office is located in Salem, the state capital, and our seven group homes are in various locations around the Salem area. We operate in two counties, Marion and Polk.

I am new to Sunny Oaks, having started in September of '04, but I've been working in the field for some time now, going on ten years. Before changing to Human Services, I worked as a technical writer and as a measurement technician. Other positions I’ve held in the field are Job Coach, Job Developer and County Investigator.

The process of getting our company set up in Therap was surprisingly easy. We started with a couple of login names, one site, and a few individual names, just to try it out. After a brief trial of a couple of days, I added all of our individuals, and created programs and sites for each of our group To add users, I went to each of our group homes and created a user name for the Team Leader, with that person sitting beside me. The process is so simple that after this one run through with me, the Team Leaders were mostly able to sign up all of their own staff. There were only a couple of times when they got stuck, and it was easily solved over the phone.

As a Data Administrator, my function has already evolved to the point where I am doing maintenance of our existing system; adding new users, re-setting passwords, and updating information about the individuals we serve. The Data Admin menus make it very easy to keep track of all this and make changes.

Bob Doede
Sunny Oaks, Inc.

Now Therap is part of our new employee orientation. The new person spends a few minutes with me, creating a log-in and password, and I give a five minute walk-through of the system. And they are ready to write reports.

When we started Therap, there were several staff who had some trepidation about the system. Some just did not like computers, or had anxiety about them, and others were not very computer literate. We had one worker who had never been on a computer. Therap sold itself even to these people. Many times, I saw people's opinion change the first time I've done one of the training sessions with Justin by teleconference, and it was very helpful. Justin has very generously offered to customize these sessions for us, and to do them during off hours, so that our second and third shift personnel are supported. Thanks, Justin.

Overall, the project is going very well, I have a stack of paper IR's on my desk, written on triplicate forms. The old way was to burst and decollate these, sort, make extra copies, date stamp, take them to the mail box and finally, enter them into our database. With Therap, all of those steps are covered when someone clicks "approve".

Thanks to all the hard-working and generous people of Therap for making this system so friendly, and for your continued support as our system grows.