Work flow for therapists

PMTO (Dutch site) is an evidence-based structured intervention program to help parents and caregivers manage the behavior of the children they are responsible for. It is designed to promote social skills and cooperation and prevent, reduce and reverse the development of moderate to severe conduct problems in children age 4 – 12.
[Quote from ISII web page]

In order to constantly prove the effectivity and to keep close watch on the "fidelity" (compliancy to method) after certification, but starting at the very beginning of the education, a comprehensive work flow system was developed, which enables therapists, their supervisors and the educators to keep track of all sessions between therapists and parent.  The people of Kleine Stappen developed this system from scratch.

What is the system for?

Our starting point was to deliver optimal support for users of the system. Professionals in health care have more on their mind than to pay extra attention to a difficult system for reporting about their action. The system had to be designed for being "liked" and even "loved" by the users.

  1. Each session between therapist and parents is recorded (with parents consent) on DVD, which is easily administrated in the system, along with basic data about the session. Each DVD is sent to the central office of the project.
  2. The educator can indicate that she/he want to see the DVD. Since the educators and trainees are physically far from each other, sending the DVD's is not a good option. DVD's that need to be seen, are sent to our video-hosting company, which encodes the video and puts it online (with severe security measures), and sends the code to the system, so users that have enough clearance, can start the video.
  3. Therapists, supervisors and educators use the system for overview of where, when and with whom sessions have taken place, researchers can make use (with all privacy related constraints) of the data for their work to constantly monitor the quality of the work.

In a previous project in Norway, all video data was collected on tapes, which were duplicated and sent by courier to Oregon, USA.

By developing this system, the following benefits were met:

  1. the educators have a constant, up-to-date overview of all activities of the therapist trainees and are able to send comments, encouragement and reports.
  2. all therapists report their own activities, and receive both telephone and on line feedback. The trainees and their supervisors can monitor their activities. By self reporting a source of errors (by data typists) was eliminated.
  3. the time needed for the whole process between recording the video and receiving feedback was shortened considerably.
  4. video's can be found and viewed multiple times and on several locations on the world at the same time. This turned out to be of great value, because this way the educators in the USA could collaborate with the Dutch educators and the Dutch trainees.
  5. All physical storage was brought back to one filing cabinet (and many Gigabytes of data on several servers), compared to at least two physival rooms in the project of Norway.