Treatment Plans: Before or After Digitization?

Assistive technology has not disappointed the hopes of care and education providers for individuals with special needs across various fields in improving the quality of their services, according to numerous scientific studies. Schoffman et al. (2017) note in their article: the trend toward converting academic services and applied behavior analysis to digital holds an important place and will propel services forward. Sooner or later, it will be proven on an empirical scientific basis¹.

The workflow—in both administrative and academic aspects—at Mustaqbal Al-Ruwwad Day Care Center, which directs its services to individuals with special needs, was a paper-based system that consumed thousands of papers and forms requiring a great deal of time, effort, and money to design, organize, and print. These were also exposed to the risk of being lost despite the diligence of both administrative and educational staff and the expenditure of much time and effort to find or replace them.

In a courageous step by both the educational and administrative staff of the center, the decision was made to pilot converting the work system at the center from paper to digital through the "Ynmo" platform.

With the center's transition to the digital system from an educational perspective—both academic and behavioral—the entire team without exception, starting from the educational supervisor and the specialists in supportive services: speech-language pathology, the psychologist, sports, physical therapy, and arts, the social worker, and the teachers, all the way to the parents, tested the use of the "Ynmo" platform.

The main reason driving us to speak about the experience of Mustaqbal Al-Ruwwad Day Care Center and share it with others is seeing its tangible, concrete results in staff performance, customer satisfaction, and client progress.

At the level of educational supervision, designing report templates, visiting each classroom or supportive service facility, or examining paper-based educational and behavioral data used to take several weeks. With the Ynmo app, however, completing the work now takes no more than two days, thanks to the ease of browsing student accounts and viewing their responsiveness to treatment plans through charts or the student's dashboard. This helped save more time for educational supervision to introduce fundamental developments to the curriculum, making it more effective and solidly grounded in science, which resulted in a more organized electronic library for the center with clearer, more accurate, and more reliable instructions, teaching methods, and data collection.

As for supportive services, spending two weeks exchanging visits for discussions on individualized behavioral, speech, or other supportive service plans has been reduced to a few days, after which reviewing the library is sufficient to know the curriculum designated for supportive services.

From an instructional perspective, the immense effort teachers used to invest in individual planning—selecting educational and behavioral goals, writing short-term objectives, communicating with the team, and discussing and analyzing events to arrive at an integrated individual plan—has literally been reduced by half or even more. Teachers' efforts shifted to solely assigning their students the short-term goals written by educational supervision. Consequently, more time became available to spend on designing teaching aids, innovating presentation methods for educational material, and implementing the educational and behavioral procedures specific to each individual plan. In addition, there is seamless and easy access to complete, organized individual plan information for each student through the app during the individual instructional session allocated to the student, simultaneously with real-time data collection. All of this is preceded by just a few seconds to prepare for the individual instructional session, instead of spending five minutes or more of individual session time organizing, preparing data collection sheets, and reviewing individual goals.

It must also be noted that communicating with parents, which used to be written in the child's daily communication notebook in the teacher's handwriting in a rush so she could place it in the child's bag before going home—consuming a great deal of the teachers' time, effort, and thought—has become more enjoyable, easier, and faster. What a teacher writes for one child can now be copied and pasted for other children with the necessary modifications added, and then shared with parents at the click of a button through the Ynmo app.

At the level of communication with parents, they exceeded the center's expectations in how quickly they learned to receive daily notes about their children sent by teachers via email. They came to look forward to receiving them day after day, took joy in reading them, and inquired through administration if they were ever delayed.

Last but not least, periodic reports—especially final reports—which previously required most staff to continue working on from home on a voluntary basis to produce them properly within two weeks, now take two working days or a little more for teachers to generate from the website for each child, adding their recommendations to maximize the benefit for parents. Added to this is the ease of downloading these reports and their inclusion of good designs and more accurate charts.

In conclusion, through this brief overview of Mustaqbal Al-Ruwwad Day Care Center's experience in digitizing treatment plans, we can objectively call it a success. Nor can we overlook how the Ynmo platform was presented to the center, the free trial period, and the professional walkthrough by the Ynmo team. In closing, we hope for further progress, innovation, and global reach for "Ynmo" services provided to individuals with special needs, while employing smart devices and assistive technology toward that end.

Abrar Ibrahim Metwally

Master's in Special Education (Autism Spectrum Disorder) – Temple University

Educational Supervisor at Mustaqbal Al-Ruwwad Day Care Center

Reference:

1. "Methods for Evaluating the Content, Usability, and Efficacy of Commercial Mobile Health Apps"

Jake-Schoffman, D. E., Silfee, V. J., Waring, M. E., Boudreaux, E. D., Sadasivam, R. S., Mullen, S. P., . . . Pagoto, S. L. (2017). Methods for Evaluating the Content, Usability, and Efficacy of Commercial Mobile Health Apps. JMIR MHealth and UHealth,5(12). doi:10.2196/mhealth.8758

Originally published in Arabic. This English version was produced with AI-assisted translation; the Arabic original remains the reference.