By: Breanne Berg, BCBA, Owner of Apex Behavior Consulting Inc.

Apex Behavior Consulting has been using TeachMe since February 2011 as our evidenced-based skills acquisition and behavior management real time data collection tool.   Currently, there are over 100 clients served by 50 therapists and staff that use TeachMe Skills as the sole form of data collection.

 

We provide all of our services in family homes and/or in the community.  Our resources travel from site to site.  Our staff now communicates with our office in real time and gets the appropriate support and guidance using TeachMe Skills. Previously, we, as most clinical and behavior professionals were using traditional pen and paper method and/or web based applications where we were tethered to a desktop.

TeachMe Skills has benefited our organization in a broad range of evidence- based interventions and strategies to address identified skill areas.   Below are highlights of those benefits.

General

The therapeutic benefits of Teach Me cannot be stressed enough.  The ability for supervisors, therapists and staff to see data in real time gives us the ability to better evaluate and modify our interventions. TeachMe Skills also provides us with more efficient communication amongst team members. The buy-in from staff and parents has substantially increased communication between them. Staff and parents can easily see what is happening rather than waiting for days or months to get reports from supervisors.  We have heard from several of our supervisors that they would not be able to maintain the number of cases they supervise with the fidelity and efficiency that they have been able to do with Teach Me.  We have experienced increased satisfaction in our services by all stakeholders.

Benefits for Skills Acquisition

• Easy evaluation and implementation of assessment including our most common assessments, VB-MAPP, ABLLS and Vineland because of TeachMe Skills alignment with assessment tools.
• Simple, efficient development and implementation of curriculum with lesson plans
• A structure for therapists and staff to accurately and reliably collect skills data, including discrete trial, chaining, and task analysis as well as qualitative anecdotal data.
• A system that is easy to train therapists and staff because of its clear presentation, thus reducing time and cost for training.
• The ability to ensure staff fidelity through real time evaluation of data collection.
• A variety of reports and graphs that make it easy to analyze and evaluate our strategies for skills acquisition through a variety of methods. (See Exhibit A below.
• Progress reports that are easy to share with all stakeholder.

Exhibit

• Student’s progress was declining until we modified our strategy guided by our lesson plans and team review.

Benefits for Behavior Interventions

• Ability to target and define multiple appropriate and inappropriate behaviors and analyze interactions between them. Each behavior intervention is customized for each student. See Exhibit B
• A structure for therapists and staff to accurately collect data, including frequency, interval, and duration with the ability to select antecedents and consequences.
• A system that is easy to train therapists and staff on.
• The ability to ensure staff fidelity through real time evaluation of data collection.
• A variety of reports and graphs that make it easy to analyze skills through a variety of methods.
• Progress reports that are easy to share with all stakeholder.

Exhibit B

Timely positive reinforcement and teaching adaptive behaviors reduced negative behaviors of student.

• The Fiscal benefits of Teach Me have been so significant to our organization.  Below are some examples of where our organization has saved money by using Teach Me Skills.  I estimate that we save around $500 per student per month, not to mention the peace of mind we have knowing that our data is available to us at anytime from anywhere.  Below are areas of savings.

• $50 per client in savings from paper and ink in printing data sheets, printing reports and graphs, gas transporting data sheets from family homes to the office, locating and reinventing lost or misplaced data sheets.
• Data collection time has been reduced for each of our staff.  We were allotting 20 minutes per 3-hour session for the staff to take data, review past data and communicate with supervisors, parents and other tutors.  We have cut this time in half and estimate that we are saving $100 a month per client.
• With Teach Me we have reduced the time it takes supervisors to evaluate and modify intervention plan by 50%.  Since evaluation of data is not a reimbursable service, we estimate that we are saving approximately $300 per client by the administrative savings.  By maximizing the administrative time, we are able to provide more billable service as well benefiting the organization as well as the client.  They are getting more service due to our efficiency.
• Quality assurance costs have reduced because it is now much faster for our quality assurance team to review programs.  We estimate that we are saving at least $50 per month per client.
• We are currently billing 5 different insurance companies for the services we provide.  Each insurance company has different standards and different reports that they require.  Since implementing Teach Me our audits have gone much smoother.  We are able to pull reports in any way that the auditors want this saves the auditors time and administrative time.  At our last Medicaid audit (our payer that has the most regulations and are the hardest to please) indicated that our audit was the quickest they did in the entire state.  We got incredibly positive results and had no issues that needed to be followed up on.  Having a positive relationship and reputation with our payers and auditors cannot be quantified!

We have been so satisfied with the results we have seen from Teach Me Skills.  All stakeholders have been impressed by the system and feel that we are on the cutting edge of ABA and special needs services.

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