There has been a lot of discussion here at the office about whether I could whip up a system for Related Services staff to be able to track intervention plans, goals, therapy notes, and benchmark completion.
Well, bad news and good news. The bad news is that right now a system like that has been pushed down the list as far as our Microsoft Power Platform is concerned.
The good news is that, with the prompting and help of Sherri Maupin-Szweda, I’ve cobbled together something that might serve quite well–and it’s all in Google Sheets.
All of the students below are made-up.
Caseloads for multiple OTs
Caseload and intervention goals for one OT
Long term goals
Measurable short term objectives
Therapy notes
Intervention plan / goal completion record.
Using any kind of cloud spreadsheets for something like this has inherent risks and disadvantages (compared to using a robust, specially designed, program).
- There’s always a risk that your users can accidentally break something by deleting a file or by messing with formatting.
- The system doesn’t scale well to lots of staff because you’re talking about a template that needs to be re-copied for everybody whenever there’s a change.
- There are limits to the kinds of automation and data management you can do.
That said, this system should get the job done for a while until a better system can replace it.
