A program director at a rehabilitation center starts her day with a paper schedule on the desk and a phone that won't stop ringing. A therapist is absent, two children need a room, and a mother wants to know her son's assessment results. In the evening the specialists sit down to score assessment forms by hand, copy the scores onto charts and write the plans. That is what we saw at Sawa Academy for special education before we built Enable 360.
Where does a specialist's time go?
The assessment itself is a small part of the work. After it comes scoring and tallying, then drawing the charts in the format of the approved forms, then writing up strengths and weaknesses, then drafting goals for each weakness, then a tracking sheet. All of it repeats at reassessment. When we measured this at Sawa before and after the system, assessments, reports, plans and tracking were getting done 60% faster.
What does a child's journey look like in one system?
- Booking and consultationParents book, and the consultant decides which assessments to run
- AssessmentDone in the system, with scores calculated as each answer is entered
- Report and planA suggested goal for each weakness, which the specialist edits
- Sessions and trackingDTT sheets and the MT, EXP and RR stages
- Mastery and generalizationAcross different therapists and settings
- HomeA mastered goal goes to the parents as practice at home
The core idea is that data gets entered once and then moves along on its own. The assessment result produces the plan, the plan appears for the specialist during the session, the session feeds the tracking, and the mastered goal flows back into the report.
Which assessment tools should a center's system support?
The ones your specialists use today, with tables and charts that look like the paper forms they're used to. If a specialist has to redraw the result by hand after entering it, the system hasn't saved them anything.
Enable 360 currently supports nine tools, including VB-MAPP with all three of its parts, ABLLS, Carolina, M-CHAT and ELM. Licensing for each tool remains the center's responsibility, under its agreements with the tools' owners. That's a question worth putting to any vendor: who covers the license, and does the tool match the approved version?
Why is scheduling the hardest operational problem?
A center runs at least three kinds of programs: individual and group clinic sessions, the day program, and inclusion support with a shadow specialist. Every child has requirements, every specialist has a specialty and set hours, and every room has a capacity. Any absence turns the schedule upside down. At Sawa this was the biggest operational problem, and today the system produces the full weekly plan and rearranges it when someone is absent, bringing in substitutes.
What changes for parents?
Parents at these centers ask the same question in different ways: what is happening with my child? When the plan, the reports and the home guidance reach them on a portal they sign in to with their phone number, the calls drop and they understand more of what is going on. They also get notifications when their child is picked up and dropped off by the center's transport.
How much paper does a center use?
Sawa Academy used to print about 150,000 sheets of paper a year. Today it's under a thousand, and everything else lives in the system. The paper that remains is for correspondence with outside bodies. That figure is specific to Sawa, and the result at any other center depends on how much manual work it had before the system.
Where is children's data stored, and who can see it?
Children's data at rehabilitation centers is among the most sensitive data there is: diagnoses, assessments, behavioral notes and photos. You need to know where it is hosted and who can access it, inside the center and outside it.
Ask for permissions that separate roles, so each specialist sees their own children, parents see only their child, and management sees the aggregated reports. Ask about backups, and how you would export the data if you decide to change systems. Enable 360 complies with Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL), and its data is hosted in Saudi Arabia.
How does a center move from paper to a system?
In phases. The easiest way is to start with new children, then move existing children's files over gradually, so that each file starts in the system at the child's next reassessment. That way the specialists don't have to enter years of old paperwork all at once.
Before going live, train the team on the screens each role will use every day, and name one person in each department whom colleagues can turn to in the first weeks.
Scheduling needs special attention at this stage, because it affects every specialist and every parent on the same day. We wrote about it in detail in scheduling sessions at therapy and rehabilitation centers. If your center works in a way that needs modules beyond what Enable 360 offers, we build them as part of our custom software and systems service.
What should you ask before choosing a system for your center?
- Does it support the assessment tools your specialists use, with tables and charts that look like the approved paper forms?
- Does the treatment plan come out of the assessment result, or does the specialist write it from scratch?
- Does it schedule all three programs together and handle absences and substitutes?
- Where is the data hosted, and can you export all of it?
- Is the interface fully in Arabic, and do the reports use the child's name and the correct masculine or feminine grammar? (Arabic changes verb and pronoun forms depending on whether the child is a boy or a girl.)
Enable 360 has been running every day at Sawa Academy for a year, with 81 children and 65 staff. Read the details on the Enable 360 page, or visit the Enable 360 website to request a demo.
Questions our partners ask
Does the system support the well-known assessment tools?
Enable 360 currently supports nine tools, including VB-MAPP with all three of its parts, ABLLS, Carolina, M-CHAT and ELM. Licensing for each tool is the center's responsibility, under its agreements with the tools' owners.
Does it suit family counseling centers?
Yes. The operating logic is the same and the difference lies in the assessment tools. The system is built from small modules, which makes it possible to add counseling and psychological support tools.
What do parents see?
A portal they sign in to with their phone number, where they book consultations and follow plans, reports and home guidance. They also get notifications when their child is picked up and dropped off by the center's transport.
Written by the Visual Innovate team, the people who build, host and follow up systems, websites and apps for our clients in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Egypt.
