OTS 158: The Future of School-based OT Documentation
- Jayson Davies
- Sep 16, 2024
- 38 min read
Updated: Dec 18, 2024
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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 158 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.
What if there was a tool that could not only help you organize your thoughts and observations into a comprehensive report but also save you hours of work each week?
Join us as Angela and Mani, the creators of Everbility, share how this game-changing tool for OTPs can streamline your documentation with customizable templates. Learn how the "brain dump" method can help you organize observations and save time, so you can focus more on supporting your students. Tune in to learn more!
Listen now to learn the following objectives:
Learners will identify the benefits of using AI tools like Everbility compared to traditional methods or other AI tools, such as ChatGPT, by focusing on template standardization, ease of use, and time savings.
Learners will understand how the Everbility tool assists occupational therapists in organizing, editing, and formatting their notes and assessments into cohesive, structured documents.
Guests Bios
Angela and Mani are co-founders of Everbility. Angela has a background in Occupational Therapy, Computer Science and Design and has worked and volunteered in health and disability services for the last 15 years.
Mani has a background in Computer Science. Before Everbility, he led the platform and infrastructure teams serving millions of users for some of the biggest brands in the world. Together, they've built Everbility to support allied health professionals and reduce their administrative and documentation burden.
Quotes
“AI, even though we call it artificial intelligence, it's not actually intelligent. And so it doesn't have clinical reasoning.”
-Angela Mariani
“If the input is bad, the output will not be as good. But if the quality of notes, the quality of services you're providing is good, then you'll have an output that is much closer to where you want it to be.”
-Mani Batra
“One of my favorite questions to prompt chat gpt is, what else do you need from me?... What other information do you need me to provide in order to give me a good response?”
-Jayson Davies, M.A, OTR/L
“Basically, you get a report that's 80, 90% finished. You can use Everbility to edit that and finish all the content for it. And then you just you're almost done and you can download it in word doc and finalize.”
-Angela Mariani
“People are saving significant time. And not just time, people are procrastinating less because they all of a sudden don't have this burden to start.”
-Angela Mariani
Resources
👉 Everbility (Affiliate link)
👉 ChatGPT
Episode Transcript
Expand to view the full episode transcript.
Jayson Davies
Hey there, and welcome back to Episode 158 of the otschoolhouse, Comcast. I just realized I always say Welcome back, but sometimes it is not welcome back. Maybe this is the very first episode that you're listening to. You just maybe saw ever ability in the title, or something related to artificial intelligence in the title, and you're just like, hey, I want to learn more about AI and school based ot Well, if that's you, or if, again, you're returning for your 100th and 58th, episode. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. This is going to be an episode that's all about helping you get done with documentation quicker than ever before, using the power of AI and here on the otschoolhouse com. I think we have touched on AI more than any other occupational therapy podcast or any real occupational therapy outlet out there, and it is something that I truly do believe in. I use it a lot in my business here at the OT school house, and I do think that it is something that is just going to change the game for occupational therapy practitioners, we're often asking ourselves, how we can be more efficient so that we can really so that we can spend more time with our kids, right the students that we work with and support. We want to get the notes done faster so that we can spend more time with them, and AI is allowing us to do that without taking away too much of what is necessary within our documentation, and so that's why today I am just really excited to introduce you to or maybe you've heard a little bit about it, but I'm excited to introduce you to everability, and the founders of everbility, Angela and Mani Mariani. So Angela is an occupational therapist, and her husband, Mani is a software engineer, and together, they have figured out how to put together a tool that is designed for us as occupational therapy practitioners, as you will hear in their voices in just a moment. They are Australian, so they're joining me pretty early in the morning when we did this interview, but they were troopers. They got up in the morning and they sat down for this interview, for you, for me, so that we could figure out how we can better use AI to support our ability to to complete notes and get things done faster and more efficiently. So without any further ado, I'm going to bring on Angela and money, and you are going to learn all about ever ability and how they have used AI to support us All right, so stay tuned.
Amazing Narrator
Hello and welcome to the otschoolhouse com, your source for school based occupational therapy, tips, interviews and professional development now to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies class is officially in session.
Jayson Davies
Angela and Mani, welcome to the otsuhaus podcast. How are you doing today?
Angela Mariani
We're really good. Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely so we are here to talk about some AI. We're here to talk about evaluations and all the really cool things that you two are doing kind of with the combination of those, and then even beyond that, to an extent. But before we do that, I want to give both of you just a quick, you know, minute or so to just kind of explain your background, because this is probably the most unique background we've ever had on the podcast. So Angela, we'll start with you. What's your background in OT?
Angela Mariani
In Australia for a number of years. I've also worked in a lot of different roles in healthcare and disability services for about 15 years. I have a background in computer science and graphic design on top of my occupational therapy background. And yeah, that's that's me
Jayson Davies
and Mani, what's your what's your ot background? Trick question here.
Mani Batra
So like, Angela and I are married, so any problems faced by Occupational Therapists like very close to home. So I am an ordinary OT. I've talked to over 200 OTS now in this journey. Yeah, probably more than that. In short, like how I got into this? Because I love playing with computers, to put it simply, and sort of myself, ascribe meaning of life as building things. And kind of just yeah, we started building things, and that's how you hear Yeah, computers and everything related to computers. That's me.
Jayson Davies
Awesome. And you two are both the creators, the co founders of everability, Ai. And just really quickly, I guess, how did you two pair up to create this? And then we'll dive into everything that it is. But like, what made you all even think to create this?
Angela Mariani
I think I'll start with that. So I'm definitely facing a problem, and I know that it's not just in Australia, and that's been through building this we've seen that, which is around clinical documentation was just really burning me out. I was often working in the evenings, on the weekends, finishing notes, finishing reports, communication with my customers, clients, patients. We've used all three words in different settings. And money had this, you know, already. Such an interest in AI that he was saying, well, there's ways that we could probably solve some of these issues you're having.
Mani Batra
Yeah, and like, over the last few years, like AI has been used in healthcare for a very long time to solve this particular problem that Angela was facing over the last few years, massively happened in generative AI. And it's like, oh, we can actually start doing something about it. So we just, yeah, uh, build something together on a weekend, put it out there, and started getting word of mouth happening. And kind of realized, as we talk to more and more people that it's actually a very massive problem, and we can actually do something to make world a little a better place.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely. Um, sorry, I have to dive into this. You said that AI has been actually used in healthcare for a decent amount of time. I can tell you that no occupational therapy practitioner understands that. I don't understand it, and I'm kind of on the upper level of understanding AI for ot practitioners, at least, I think so. I want to ask you, when you're saying that AI's been in healthcare. I mean, how long? What does that look like? I mean, have we been using this and not even realized it generative?
Mani Batra
AI, no, when I say generative, AI, I mean text generation, sort of like chatgpt, that has been very recent, because the level of accuracy has gone up massively in the recent years, but sort of visual image recognition, say, scanning some X rays and detecting a disease that has been around for, I would say, 10 years or more, and the quality, the accuracy, has been increasing over a while. I remember, like, one of the first projects I ever studied in AI was like skin cancer detection. And this was like around 10 years ago, and even at that time, the accuracy that AI could provide was better than doctors. So, yeah,
Jayson Davies
Wow, that's impressive. So reading X rays, anything else that like OTS might be using, maybe not school based ot practitioners, but in general, I mean, documentation, has it been around, or is that more in the new horror phase.
Angela Mariani
Yeah, that's definitely since the generative AI leap sort of happens, you know, with like Jack TPT is the best example. There's other really cool things that have been being worked on and developed. So, you know, still kind of around that image recognition stuff. But people are working on, you know, even robotics that can support in therapy. People are working on robots to help with physical therapy. This is actually so many really cool things happening, even outside the documentation space.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, and it's only going to exponentially increase from here. I mean, we're seeing startups every single week, not just in healthcare, but just in AI in general, right? There's every week there's a new AI product out there, but yeah, well, I'm super excited for you, because both of you put together a really cool product, and I want to come back to your money one more time, because you said it in a weekend, like, I wouldn't know where to start. I would not know where to start here. What do you mean in a weekend?
Mani Batra
So, oh, we wanted to build out a proof of concept. And I think the biggest sort of hypothesis that we wanted to prove out was like, will someone actually use it? And the best way to do that, we believe, is putting something out there, even if it is half baked. So we just put out like a simple chat bot, which was fine tuned. When I say fine tuned, I mean, had extra knowledge about one of the funding models in Australia, and which is a very cumbersome funding model to navigate, called the NDIS. So we kind of, yeah, gave the Chatbot extra information about that and put it out there. You could ask questions about the NDIS, navigate different policies. And yeah, it was done in a weekend. And then we because that also gave us an opportunity to put it in someone's hand and talk to them about it. And through that process, we've gone through like hundreds of iterations and availability has taken shape.
Angela Mariani
The product looks completely different. It's been worked on for hundreds of hours.
Jayson Davies
I bet. I bet. I mean, I have played around chat GPT a little bit to make my own gpts to kind of help me out a little bit like, hey, I want to create a goal centered around this, and then it knows that I want a SMART goal that comes with, you know, everything, accommodations, potentially treatment strategies. So I'm assuming that's what your initial kind of look like, right? Is, I'm assuming something like a GPT or some maybe a little bit more complex than that,.
Mani Batra
you're very close. Yeah, yeah, for sort of custom gbds,
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah. Very cool. So Angela, now you kind of brought the OT side, obviously to this. So when money started putting stuff into the computer, saying, hey, I want the computer to learn this, what were some of the things that you knew to tell him, like, hey, we need to make sure it has this, this and this, what were some of the things you really wanted it to have?
Angela Mariani
I mean, initially, we definitely put a lot of that NDIS sort of knowledge into it, because it was actually facing the problem as a therapist, but also as a family member. I was trying to my sister is actually a participant. In the NDIS, and I was trying to navigate some changes we were trying to do for her, and we were was basically an urgent change of circumstances, and we weren't getting the support we were needing. And I was like, why can't I find the answer to this anywhere online? And so, you know, building that out, I was like, Oh, we definitely, you know, can use this in that way as well. I think one of my biggest concerns that we talked about a lot initially was around like responsible use of AI and wanting to make sure that we could make it as accurate as possible. Obviously, AI has its limitations, so we wanted to make sure that we weren't going to be causing any harm by putting this out in the world when it was at the time so so new, and people were extremely afraid of it. Thankfully, that's shifted in the last year and a half, like people are now very much open, ready to try, even though they understand the limitations a little bit more, which is, I think, better. So, you know, we talked a lot about that, and did some things to make it as accurate as possible, and then gave, you know, the caveat to any customers that you're going to still need to check every single thing it says. And we still, we still do that, because anything in this space, you know, you need to make sure that you're the one putting your name against it as a clinician.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah. And so then, how did you all be it sounds like you started with this NDIS program, so I'm going to share a lot of what you were feeding it was based upon this NDIS, but as you started to go down the rabbit hole, and I think, kind of expand the market, right? You're obviously no longer just in Australia. You've now expanded, I'm assuming, basically worldwide. What have you started or, I guess, how were you training it? What are you? What are you giving it? What are you? How are you making sure the quality of what you give it this quality. Like, how's that going?
Mani Batra
Yeah. So, like, we started with the NDIS Chatbot. We got on a call with a therapy team here in Australia, and we had a conversation with them for over three hours late into the night, and kind of discovered that, oh, this is just a start with just touching the tip of the iceberg, and then massive problems to be solved there. So with that, we started building out the first version of what we call the editor, which is an AI powered editor that can help you write anywhere from like a short case note to a very long documentation or a report. For example, like in Australia, people are writing reports up to 80 pages, 100 pages. It's crazy. So we started that, and that snowballed into us getting interest from people in the UK, in the US primary and like Malaysia, New Zealand, from all over the world. And we started talking to these customers and hydrating on the product. One thing we made sure was most of the documentation and anything that AI generates is driven by the quality of notes that the practitioner provides. So that is the primary source of information. Yes, it has all the knowledge about therapy world, but that is general knowledge. Most of the sort of generation happens based on the notes provided by the therapist. So still driven by a therapist or a practitioner's skills. And then, as a second step, we started building out tools that helps them kind of verify any information that is generated. Like Angela said, responsible AI is one of our sort of biggest hypothesis concerns that we need to make sure that we do the best we can by our customers, and we do understand that AI is not 100% accurate, at least not right now. In the future where it's going, it probably will be but not right now. So we have built this tool called verifiable AI users can find links from all over the web, peer reviewed research in a matter of seconds to kind of back anything and everything generated in our ability.
Jayson Davies
Sorry, I am thinking to myself, how far into the weeds I want to go into this while trying to remember my audience? No, my audience. I don't want to. I don't want to go so far into it that they're like, Yeah.
Angela Mariani
I think actually one thing that might be good to add on and money was just saying, is around, like, amount of context being put into a report. Because that's one of the things that we really got as feedback from our customers. Was around, you know, not having the ability to easily marry up the context with the generated part. So what we've built out is that they can have, you know, like, any number of notes about their client, any number of, you know, reports, assessments, anything they want to pull from, and then they have an entire template set up, and it just pulls the right information into the right sections, which is such a huge help when you're thinking about the old way of using chat GPT, I call it the old way. It's not going to run that, you know, and you know, people would have to give the right context with the right question, and it's a little bit cumbersome and slow, and then iterating upon whatever's generated, as well as something else we've been on. Optimizing. So.
Jayson Davies
I think, yeah, and tagging on to that, I think another thing is that this product, everability, Ai, keeps saying everability Ai, it's just ever ability, but your ever ability, it's, it's designed for all ot practitioners, not like one specific segment of OT practitioner, right? It's not just for school based, not for pediatric clinic, not for adults, hands, whatever it might be, it's for everyone. So how did you kind of, I guess, put this in a way that it could be used for everyone? Like my evaluations are very different from an acute rehab OTS evaluations, right? So how did you kind of marriage this so that it could be worked for everyone?
Angela Mariani
Yeah, so I think as we started talking to more and more people, we ended up building a very customizable product. And actually not just OTs, we've opened up to a lot of other allied health professions as well. So people can set up custom templates that have, you know, as custom as you want, really, so your evaluations can be completely exactly the way you want them to be. We are building out more and more things to continue supporting those different sort of needs. Some of the exciting things that are coming really support organizations as well, and standardizing reports, and doing quality assurance on reports, and some of those other things that are coming that aren't necessarily needed by everyone, but I think.
Mani Batra
And when we onboard like a new customer, we ask them, like, what their profession is, what funding model they work with, what language do they use? Like right now we support US and UK English, so that allows us to customize the responses in anything that is generated to a particular profession, to a particular funding model, to a particular language, yeah,
Jayson Davies
gotcha. Okay, so today we're talking the first day of August, 2 day of August. For you all in Australia, here we're talking about AI and evaluations right now. What are some of the limitations for AI within maybe evaluations, but maybe just kind of in documentation in general. What are some of the limitations still today?
Angela Mariani
Yeah, definitely AI, even though we call it artificial intelligence, it's not actually intelligent, and so it doesn't have clinical reasoning. It can make some inferences, it can make recommendations, and it can do things, but with a massive caveat that it it's not necessarily going to be right. It can sound really but you need to have the same critical reasoning that you have when you search the internet anytime you're using any AI product. We've done a lot of work to make it as good as it can be. And it should really be 80 or 90% of the way there, but that's still eight or 90% so the therapist has to put in the time to review and make sure that it says what they want to say. Another limitation that a lot of AI tools do have, that evidability doesn't, because we've worked around generating any length documentation, is they are generated by output length. Sorry, are limited by output length, and that can be difficult when you're trying to write something that is, you know, significantly long, and you want to get a really detailed answer, but it's trying to summarize everything very briefly, because it's trying to answer your entire question in one, one chunk.
Mani Batra
And still driven by the quality of the notes. So like, the session that you're having with the client, and notes you're capturing during that, whether that's a transcription of just you you're talking with the client, like, if the input is bad, the output will not be as good, but the quality of notes, the quality of services you're providing, is good, then you'll have an output that is much closer to where you want it to be.
Angela Mariani
And also not just good, it's whole. So you need to have all the facts. They don't have to be written well, in the sense that you don't have to formalize the sentences, because that's what the AI is doing for you. But if the facts don't live somewhere, it doesn't know information.
Jayson Davies
Yeah. I mean, one of my favorite questions to prompt chat GPT is like, what else do you need from me? What else? What other information do you need me to provide in order to give me a good response? I ask AI that all the time, so completely understand that one. All right, so most of the context that we talked already so far about has been really about AI and evaluations. We have talked about everability, but I haven't given you actually the opportunity to really like explain in full what everability is. So I want to give you that opportunity really quickly here just to kind of your overall understanding or overall view of everability and how it supports OTs.
Angela Mariani
Yeah, wonderful. So currently, eviability is your best documentation admin assistant. I'll say admin because it's doing some admin tasks and it will do more in the future. So whether you're doing you know, case notes, letters, correspondence reports, brainstorming. Testing, session, planning, home programs, policies, supervision, sessions, like honestly, so many different things can be supported with eviability. We've got two sort of parts of the software, which is the editor, writer, we call it, which we've been talking more about so far, and then also assistant, which is a chat based back and forth conversation interface, but it's private and secure, and you can have your client information being used as context to those conversations. In the future, we're building more and more automations so that you can give it tasks, and it can go and do those things for you, and you'll still have an option to say, you know, I want to make sure I check this before you reply to these things. But we're building out more and more automated processes so that we can just take such a huge burden off of practitioners and really let people go back to being face to face with customers and clients. I keep calling clients and patients customers today, but they are really our customers in some way, aren't they? So you know, we can be more face to face and not be so stuck behind a computer, which most people, hate.
Mani Batra
Yeah, one thing I'll just add to it. So like before, we going to start at the spot, because we were talking about the ease of starting a business. So we envision ability to be an entire team that helps you with your business, the entire occupational therapy business, whether that's making appointments, scheduling, billing, invoicing, generating documentation. So yeah, we want it to be something that allows you to have an entire team at your hands, and allows you to start that business that you want to do.
Jayson Davies
Wow. So basically like a EMR on steroids with AI basically like it can do everything, maybe even more.
Angela Mariani
Yeah, we're, we're looking to actually integrate with EMRs and practice management systems and be an automation layer, because a lot of these softwares already have so much that stuff built out, but they're not really good at the AI automation part of things. So really integrating and linking up all of the different software that's being used across, you know, anything you need to use. There's so many different things people are using. And just being able to say, I want you to, you know, go and communicate with this one and do this task for me. And things in that, in that way.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, in a moment, I kind of want to walk through the process from the moment a school based OT or OT practitioner receives a referral, and kind of walk through that and however ability might assist them. But before I do that, I definitely want to address the privacy side of things. Whenever AI comes up, that's a huge one right in the US, especially in the schools, we have both HIPAA and fairpa that we have to, we have to comply with. And so how does everability address that? Is it fully addressed? Do ot practitioners here need to do something or to make sure everything's HIPAA compliant. What's the story behind that?
Mani Batra
Yeah, so right now, our ability is HIPAA compliant and compliant with the Australian Privacy Principles, FERPA is on our radar, but right now, we are pursuing GDPR as the next compliance, and then in the future, SOC two in terms of the responsibility of the practitioners. If you obviously need HIPAA compliance, we are happy to sign a BAA with you. If you need FERPA, we don't currently have that. So if you're using availability in your school based order, you it's your responsibility to de identify the information. But if you just need HIPAA, then you can use availability with real patient names and and then those as is. So we have some clients in the UK, for example, and and in some other sort of in Canada. Also, like Canada, has its own compliance requirements, so they use their ability with the identified information, and it still saves them so much time that it is worth it.
Jayson Davies
How do they do that? How do they de identify the information, but still keep it worthwhile,
Angela Mariani
I guess, to use it. Yeah, so basically using a pseudonym, just not putting in the date of birth and the address and some key identifiers, and then the information is de identified enough that it's not going to be a problem.
Jayson Davies
Yeah. And then I guess you just copy it, copy and paste to your, you know, Word doc, and just Command F, Control F, and change all the names. Basically, yeah, sounds simple enough. All right, fair enough. All right. Moving on. Now, like I said, I do want to kind of go through this process, because I think school based ot practitioners will really appreciate this. In school based ot REL, we get a RE, we get an assessment plan, which basically gives us 60 days depending on what state you're in or where you're located, to complete the evaluation process. From there, we've got to we've got to start to collect our occupational profile. We've got to start doing observations, maybe a standardized or unstandardized assessment tool then and then eventually write it all up. Right? So in which of those steps all. Of steps, none of those steps would ever ability be helpful and how?
Angela Mariani
Yeah, definitely. So from the very initial point, and I'll ask you some questions here, because my understanding us based processes is a little bit less detailed than yours, what kind of information are they giving you in that first step?
Jayson Davies
So we get very little like a maybe a reason for the referral. So let's assume that we are being told that the student is being referred to OT because he's having, he or she's having difficulty with attention in the class, poor organizational skills, not writing down the homework for getting to turn homework in. Let's just go with some organization here.
Angela Mariani
So even from that initial point, if you, for example, are more a junior clinician, or you maybe haven't worked with someone that kind of goal or area, and you want to just use evidability as a brainstorming place to go, almost like you go and google it, but you can actually have a more interactive conversation with the assistant in eviability, and you can ask questions about, you know, what could be my plan be here? I have 60 days to address this, and actually just use that to sort of flesh out your, your approach that you're going to take, and then after that, so you, I'm assuming you might contact some of the other stakeholders in that person's life. You can actually use that ability to record those conversations anytime you're recording another person that you do need to ask consent every single time you're doing that, but you can get the transcription out and, you know, create case notes from that. Yep.
Jayson Davies
So, yeah, no. So if we're not, if we're having a conversation, you said, we need to get permission to record that conversation. But what if I send out a Google form to collect data from the parent and paper pencil from the teacher? Can I maybe upload that or copy and paste it into everability?
Angela Mariani
Yeah. So if you have text based, you know, documents where you've asked someone a question via form, you can definitely get that information into ability and use that whilst asking questions and generating content written, handwritten, things we currently don't interpret. But there are other tools you can use to copy that most people you know have iPads and things like that, that actually already can turn that into tech. So that's a better way to, you know, pull that information in. We potentially might have that feature in the future as well.
Jayson Davies
Okay, so then now you've got some of this data just on that data alone. I mean, everability is already starting to put together a picture of this child that we're working with, right? Yeah, definitely. So if I were then to go into everability and say, Hey, can you help me develop an occupation or profile like an intro to my report based upon the information we currently have, it would start to develop that. Yeah,
Angela Mariani
yes, definitely. You know, I think the thing is, you'll need to know if the information that you want in that is already in your notes, or if you need to also add to that, yeah, a lot of people, as they're seeing people and getting clinical impressions and getting your own kind of clinical reasoning happening, they also just brain dump that information into evidibility. They say, Oh, I had this conversation with the teacher, and this seems to be what's going on, and this is kind of my hypothesis. And, you know, they kind of put in that path as well. Yeah, would you
Jayson Davies
say that's a good way to do it, the rain dump? Or do you need to be more articulate in how much information is too much information, I guess a bad thing?
Angela Mariani
I wouldn't say too much information is a bad thing. I think if you're mindful what you've got, where you can still be very precise with what you're choosing for what you're generating. So if you know that you've done a brain dump that you can label, you know brain dump hypothesis, maybe you don't select that when you're writing the final report, because by then you already know you know what you've done and all of that. But if you want to use that in your own process to even generate sort of a plan, and you're sort of thinking around the next things, then you can do that. I don't know if that's made sense, without actually seeing how it works. Me saying talking about selecting and unselecting things, well,
Jayson Davies
I mean, but if you give it your brain dump, right, like, kind of in the back end, not on the actual report, but kind of as a note, right? You give it your brain dump, when you then go into your report, it will pull information from your brain dump, but it might do it in a more organized way than you put into the brain dump correct, definitely.
Angela Mariani
And that's what I was saying. Like when you're actually writing a report, you can choose to have that brain dump being used or not. So if you know that the brain dump was kind of half baked in sense that you're not actually fully wanting that information, or you don't have to use it, but you can if it is, you know, accurate and you want to use it. So
Jayson Davies
you can pick and choose what the AI has access to, basically, in terms of the notes that you've given it. Yeah, exactly. Gotcha Perfect. All right, so we kind of went through the occupational profile the next steps is, at least for me. An observation. So I'm going to go into the classroom. I'm going to do an observation. I'm going to pull the student out into the OT room, ot closet, wherever. We might have do some structured fine motor activities, visual motor activities. Maybe look at sensory a little bit. And I'm going to take some notes. Where do I go from there with every ability?
Angela Mariani
Yeah. So everyone takes notes slightly differently. Some people actually type during those observations. I was never able to when I worked in pediatric OT, I always found that incredibly disruptive. But everyone's different. I usually just scribbled on a notepad really, really bad scribble that meant only what it meant to me. If I looked a few days later, I had no idea what it meant anymore. So a lot of people actually, straight after their sessions will open up ability and do a brain dump that says, Okay, this is what we did. This is what I observed. This is, you know, and that's a lot more, I suppose. That's not really hypothesis anymore. That's actually my observations, what I've interpreted, what I'm going to work on next. And then you you have that you can pull and you can generate a case note. You can even generate correspondence to different stakeholders from that. You can say, you know, write a an email to this student's teacher. You could write an email to the students parents based on this, and you know what I want to do next, and, etc, etc, so
Jayson Davies
Okay, or I could just basically tell to write a nice three paragraph piece that I could add into my evaluation that describes the student during the class time that I observed him, and it'll pull that all in together, right? Yeah, definitely awesome. All right, one more step, and then we're going to get to the fun part. But the last step is the actual assessment. So I'm going to go use just some random, popular school based ot assessments, the bot to the SPM sensory profile and fun. This is where I know sometimes things get tricky, because I have tried to play around with chatgpt and give it bot scores, and it tries to make up answers to my bot scores, it'll tell me the kid was average, when, if I look in the book, it's really below average or whatnot. So when it comes to assessment pieces and everability, what does the therapist need to do in order to actually get some good output from everb? BS, AI, a lot of people
Angela Mariani
are using online services like the Pearson ones to actually do a lot of assessments. And so then they'll download the report from Pearson and copy and paste that into a note, so all the information interpretation is already in a note. And then they get that. They get ever ability to pull it into the tables and write it in nice paragraphs that are actually more like they normally do in their reports. And so people are already doing that. If you find you're using a different tool and you finding some issue like that, please let us know, because we've done it quite a few times where we've gotten it to work in those different situations, and it's around knowing how to instruct it to say, Okay, it's always making this mistake. We'll tell it, but that's not really what it needs to be doing. All
Jayson Davies
right. Cool. So basically, as long as you can get the test scored, then you can use those scored results, give that to everability say, Hey, this is Jason scores on the bot two. This is what the bot two gave me, table and all. And then everability can then use that as data to help with the report that correct? Yep. Okay, perfect. So recap, we've got our occupational profile, we've got our observations, we've got some information from standardized or non standardized assessment tools. Now it's time to get to the piece where I think really makes or breaks an occupational therapy evaluation, and that's the synthesis tying all of that stuff together. So if I get down to my synthesis, and now I've got those three pieces already done, how's everability going to help me with tying it all together to ultimately help me write a coherent piece that describes why or why not, this student necessarily needs ot services?
Angela Mariani
Yeah. So people typically set up their template, and we also support with that, if you, you know, don't know how to get started with that of whatever their that looks like for them, because everyone has their own format. Every every setting has a very different style of final output. So you have your template set up, you have all that context, and you get evident to synthesize it into that for you so that you have something that is almost finished. I would say you typically need to add in your recommendations. Like I said earlier. Eviability will generate recommendations for you if you don't, but make sure you read them with a fine tooth comb if you to them. Yeah, so. And basically, you get a report that's 80 90% finished. You can use ability to edit that and finish all the content for it, and then you just you're almost done, and you can download it in Word doc and finalize it on your head, and yeah, you're good to go.
Mani Batra
And it's something this is where everability actually shines compared to other two. Tools like chatgpt, where you can actually set up an entire template. Yes, you have to do that initial work, and we are happy to help you with that. But once you have your template ready, you can really start generating reports very, very fast and get 80 to 90% there. And also great for organizations where you want standardization amongst all your practitioners, you can have a template that you can share amongst all practitioners to start achieving, like, better quality reports.
Jayson Davies
Gotcha, yeah. And when it comes to that template that we're talking about, I know every school based OT, every OT, right? Like you're saying, we have our template. A lot of times our template are like a paragraph that we need to fill in the client, student, child's name, their date of birth, it's got the student did really well in blank. The student had concerns with blank. Is that what the template would kind of look like, inevitability, or does it look different because AI needs like a prompt or something?
Angela Mariani
Well, they are prompts in a way. So typically, there's a couple of ways people set up their templates, they have something like that, which is telling you have ability to fill in sections of a paragraph, okay, which it can do. We also have the ability to actually just set up tables. So you don't have to tell it write a table that covers this, this and this and this, you can actually just insert a table have headers, have, you know, some heads within the cells, inevitability can populate that some people write very generic prompts as well, where they say background information is the header and then underneath it says write a paragraph covering the background information for the selected client. So it really is up to you to figure out what kind of prompting, like I said, we do support that. It's through testing and figuring out, hey, does this work for me? And is this making it what I want the result? But yeah, you can
Mani Batra
But yeah, you can totally use it to fill in just simple words, like you said, date of birth and profession and anything you want. So it doesn't have to be an entire paragraph like you would in chat, GPT, it can be those simple words.
Jayson Davies
Gotcha. Very cool. All right. Now I think this is where it start to get even more fun, because now we have a we have an evaluation, right? We got the occupational profile, we got the observations, the assessment, we got a synthesis, we got a recommendation at the end. But obviously now we actually have to start to treat the student, we've got to come up with a treatment plan. We've got to come up with goals. We've got to actually plan each session out how we're going to work with that student. So once we're done with our evaluation, with everability, does it continue to work with us? Or is that basically the end point? No,
Angela Mariani
definitely. So people then go back to using assistant typically, and say, you know, these are kind of the goals I'm thinking about working on. Can we help, you know, formalize this. People set up gas scales as well. Gas scales as repetitive as in, redone because, answer, scale, goal attainment scales. You know, whatever form you want to do you're setting in, people will definitely use an ability to support that process, session planning. Actually, one of the things during demos people absolutely love is the brainstorming feature. So, you know, you can tell it I'm working on, or it can even know that from the notes, but I'm working on buying motor skills with this client. And you know, you can have a lot of that assessment information selected in the notes. You know, currently they are, you know, holding their pencil in a fist grasp, and they're, you know, whatever the information is, I can't not having a good go thinking of a client on the spot right now. But brainstorm five Engaging Ideas to work on this that integrate, you know, Lego and dinosaurs and, like, you know, kind of making the therapy plan very specific to their interests as well, and kind of thinking of new activities. People love that because it's faster than going to Pinterest and saying, fine, motorhome, this client's not going to like this. None of these are appropriate. So,
Jayson Davies
absolutely, absolutely, yeah, I mean, I use chat GPT in a similar way, and I played around with it. But as you both have talked about, right, like, what's nice about every ability is it's been trained with ot data, to an extent, a lot more, at least, than chat GPT, and so it's really going to help, help you to progress with the therapy, with your students. Now within school based OT, I know, again, this is school based OT, those are the people listening. So we're going down that route. We have to typically provide a progress report every three months or so, quarterly or trimester, Lee, depending on the school district. And then one year, we have to do an annual IEP. So how does ever ability if we or how should we use it, I guess, to make those progress reports a little bit easier on ourselves? Yeah,
Angela Mariani
same as what we were talking about before, on setting up a template, I've already helped people set up their IEP and progress report templates, so I know that it's possible you basically. Can get them in as a template, populate those, make sure the information that you're selecting, and if ability is you know, all the facts are living there. But you can easily populate and the same, generate something that's 80, 90% of the way there. And
Mani Batra
just to talk about that a little bit. So once you have that template ready, you literally just click one button and it'll take all the information from your notes, fill that entire thing up that is ready, but you can also iterate on it really fast, compared to chatgpt, where it'll have to generate the entire thing again, you can actually select parts of the report that you want to change, improve, edit, and do it with the help of AI and AI knowing all the information about your client.
Jayson Davies
Wow. So the key here, as far as treatment goes, is making sure that you're inputting treatment notes, because as long as you're putting inputting your treatment notes, then everability is going to be able to support you with every progress monitoring, right?
Angela Mariani
And people, as they're seeing clients, they actually just do that brain dump every single time generate the formalized case notes, because, you know, it's much faster. It takes a couple of minutes to generate adaptability, rather than typing it out yourself, and that information's been there over time that it can pull from.
Jayson Davies
What are you finding? How are you finding that OTs, OTAs as well? Best do that brain dump? Are they copying and pasting whatever note they might put into a billing, or are they doing a complete different note because they're just talking to everability? What or, I mean, I'm sure you're seeing all the above, but what have you seen people have the most or the best use cases for? So
Angela Mariani
definitely, we've seen a shift in people's behavior. So before, like before AI existed, people would have to manually type out a case note that would be attached to a billing but now people, while they're cleaning up the clinic, or they're driving to their next appointment, or they're sitting in the car after their appointment, they're actually just recording a couple of minutes about this is what happened. This is what we did. This is my plan for the next appointment. They're saving that recording. They're either generating straight away, depending where they are, well, they're coming back at the end of the day and then generating their case note that's attached to the billing. Wow.
Jayson Davies
Okay, so I'm just thinking out loud here. I just completed a session with the student. I said, All right, Johnny, we're done. Head back to class, I grabbed my phone, hit record, record myself saying how Johnny did, how he was feeling that day. He made progress on this goal. Didn't make progress on that goal. Next week, we're going to continue with the plan of care, but maybe we're going to address something related to copying from the board, yep. I just then submit that up to everability. It now has that data. And then from there, can I tell it to write a note for a billing?
Angela Mariani
Yep, exactly.
Jayson Davies
Wow. And then also it's there for when my progress report comes around three months from now, it's going to refer to that note as well as my other 18 notes. Yep,
Angela Mariani
exactly. So that's what we were talking about earlier. Around you can choose which notes are your context. So in that case, where you've done that verbal kind of summary of what's happened, you'd only select that verbal summary. Actually, sometimes people also have a very general one that covers, these are the goals for therapy. This is the client's kind of background, just so that has that context you can pull from as well, because it's going to be relevant to every case note. So then you just select what's relevant to what you're writing, whenever you're writing it, wow,
Jayson Davies
I got to hand it to you both. I'm kind of amazed by the possibilities that can occur with this, and it's going to save so many people time. In fact, I'm sure you have both probably already looked at this. Are you getting any data on how much time ever ability is saving therapists at this point?
Angela Mariani
Yeah, we are. We're getting, obviously, we work with people all across the world, you know, different settings, different practices, different kinds of practitioners. So it's in creative, incredibly varied. But you know something like case notes people are getting done in less than five minutes, obviously, including the recording and the generation part, where, you know, before that was taking minimum 15 minutes, sometimes much longer. You know, also from one verbal you can also then generate correspondence. So if you know, some people always email different stakeholders in child's life, maybe they're emailing the parents, the teacher, the other practitioners working with them. So they can actually generate emails based off of those as well. Very, very quickly in the future, we'll integrate with email so you can one click, but you copy and paste that right now. Yeah, so that's just on case notes. When it comes to writing much longer things, people are giving us feedback. Obviously, when you're writing something very long, the savings are going to be significantly more, because if you think about 80, 9080, to 90% Decision is huge. But if you're writing a report that typically takes you an hour, probably is taking you half an hour now instead, because you still need to go through and edit and read it. But if it was taking four hours, maybe it only takes 45 minutes now. So it's like very varied, but people are saving significant time, and not just time, people are procrastinating less because they all of a sudden, don't have this burden to start. So we've been getting feedback from some of our organizations that use us that therapists are finishing their case notes within 12 hours of appointments, which is huge, because before it was taking them a week sometimes to submit their their case notes. They're finishing reports within a more reasonable time frame as well, you know? So it's, it's not this huge kind of mountain to start writing something anymore. They can go and they can generate and then it feels like you're editing someone else's report, which is a lot less stressful and cumbersome.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So here's another question for you, because you are obviously building, you are obviously dealing not just with individual practitioners, but also the larger companies that I'm sure you have partnerships with. What have you found to be some of the ways that the individual practitioners are able to get their companies on board, because I'm I'm assuming that most therapists are finding out about you not from the company. They're finding out about you from podcast, from YouTube, from me, from other people, right? But how are they effectively advocating for their district to kind of say, Hey, let's go see if we can get our ability to support our therapist. What's been effective?
Angela Mariani
These questions stumping me so like, I'm thinking about, yeah, okay,
Mani Batra
I think you're absolutely right that our strategy has been very bottoms up, where people are finding us through word of mouth podcast, we have not done any advertisement. Like we don't do ads right now, because we're just focused on building a really good product, and we want to be really connected to our users. So someone finds us it is affordable enough to be used by an individual, so they try it out, then they reach out to us to give a demo to their entire organization. So most of our organization sales have been through us, going into the organization, talking to the various stakeholders, giving them a demo, whatever ability can do for them. And that's how individuals have made a case for availability. Yeah,
Jayson Davies
yeah. I mean, I'm just assuming that conversation between the OT practitioner and their administrator, like I'm just picturing them saying, Hey, I am overburdened. I have this huge case though, that I can't manage. But instead of getting an additional ot to support me, here's a creative way we can use everability to save me 50% of my documentation time, which then would allow me to see more students or do more of this or that or whatnot. And so I could just see therapists getting a little creative in how they kind of pitch this to their administrators before they might even email you, I don't know, but yeah, I just think it's I'm always hearing from OTS who say, hey, the paperwork is burdensome because of the paperwork, I can't do my responsibilities, I have missed sessions, and I think we have to be creative in the way that we pitch that to administrators, because if we just say, hey, I need another ot to come help me. That's $100,000 right there, like, you know, and so versus ever ability, a lot cheaper than $100,000 can help them potentially get more time in their day and apparently procrastinate left less, according to Angela, so yeah, I think that's a great tool that a lot of people are obviously very excited about. So kudos to both of you. Appreciate having you on thank you with that before I let you both go and get on with your morning in Australia, time where can everyone go to learn more about everability, learn more about the AI tools that everability has been so great in implementing and using to help them with their therapy.
Angela Mariani
So, you know, we'd love to share a special deal with you guys. You'll have a link that you can get about a 20% discount off of your subscription for the first few months, three months, I think it is. And you know, come to our website and even sign up for a mailing list if you're not ready to try it, we send updates about what's happening, and you can always jump on a meeting with us as well if you'd like to actually ask any questions directly. And
Mani Batra
yeah, we pride ourselves on our customer service. You can book as many training sessions, demos with our team as you want, and that's totally free of cost. Really see ourselves as your IT team. Anything and everything that has been built by our team is because the feedback that has been provided by our wonderful customers. So yeah, give us lots of feedback. Our feelings will not be heard, even if it's negative, absolutely
Jayson Davies
and as. You've heard for the last hour or so on this podcast. They are both very friendly, very easy to talk to people. So yeah, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for creating this, this amazing product ever ability. I'm sure it's it's already helping a lot of people. I'm sure it's going to help a lot more therapists in the very near future and long term. And I'm excited to see how it works out for you, too. So thank you so much for being here.
Angela Mariani
Thank you so much for having us.
Mani Batra
It was my first podcast. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Yeah.
Jayson Davies
All right, and that is going to wrap us up for Episode 158 of the otschoolhouse. Comcast. A big thank you to Angela and Mani for coming on this episode, sharing a little bit about how they built everbility and the reasons why they built it and how it can support you and me and all the other ot practitioners out there, whether you're school based or not, in getting our work done more efficiently so that we can spend more time with our clients, with the students who we actually got into ot to actually support. If you'd like to learn more about everability, be sure to click over to the show notes at otschoolhouse com, slash Episode 158, or use the link that is in the description wherever you're listening, because that'll take you over to our show notes, where you will find a link to everability that will not only get you the best possible deal if you want to try it out, but it'll also support the otschoolhouse com podcast, and everything that we do here at the otschoolhouse podcast. So thank you so much. I really appreciate you listening in today. I hope you learned a little bit more about AI, about writing goals, about getting some documentation done, and everything that we do as school based ot practitioners, especially when it comes to documentation. So thanks again for tuning in, and we'll see you next time on the otschoolhouse podcast.
Amazing Narrator
Thank you for listening to the otschoolhouse podcast, for more ways to help you and your students succeed right now, head on over to otschoolhouse com Until next time class is dismissed.
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