Argosy University Streamlines Clinical Tracking for Students and Supervisors
Argosy University Streamlines Clinical Tracking for Students and Supervisors
The Challenge
Maintaining Accurate Records of Student Clinical Hours
Before Florida School of Professional Psychology (FSPP) at Argosy University, Tampa began using Time2Track in 2013, recording student practicum hours was a tedious and time-consuming paper-based process. “Students would have to have evaluators at the site sign off, and then we’d take the rating forms and manually enter each of the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. We had two or three checkpoints where we’d have one person go through and tally the numbers, then a second person would verify the tally,” said Director of Practicum Training Gary Howell. If there was a discrepancy, yet another person would run the numbers.
“Imagine doing that for 100+ students,” said Howell. “We knew we needed to save personnel time — we were using work-study students and not all of them were familiar with our program, processes or tracking hours in general. We were having a hard time getting someone who could confidently tally the things we needed, and our administrative assistant just didn’t have time.”
Results
Implementing Time2Track enabled FSPP to:
Reduce the time entering each evaluation
from 10+ hours in some cases to a matter of minutes
Easily collect data for APA accreditation
Mine data to make ongoing program decisions
and understand how students work in the community
I’ve been impressed with how easy it is to pull data from Time2Track, as well as the ease of use for both our students and clinical supervisors.
— Gary Howell, Director of Practicum Training
The Solution
A Flexible, Web-based Time Tracking Solution
Howell said it was easy to get students and supervisors on board with Time2Track. “All they had to do was create a login,” he said. Previously, supervisors had to hand-write forms and save copies of them. “Now it’s literally a couple of clicks and they’re sitting with the student and the evaluation is done,” Howell explained. He added that the ability to tailor Time2Track to Argosy’s program helped build buy-in. “We were able to put all our own forms into Time2Track — we didn’t have to change them,” he said.
“Many of our students who have gone on to internships continue that use Time2Track, including several at the VA, which has begun to use it. I know our students are continuing to use it beyond the practicum experience,” Howell said.
The University’s Outcome
“The time savings is astronomical compared to what we were doing before. So many hands had to touch all the data to get it from paper forms into the spreadsheet!” said Howell.
Having information accessible via the web in real time has made it easier to mine data in a variety of ways. Howell can quickly produce the reports he needs for APA accreditation. “We are tracking competencies and now looking at other pieces of the evaluation process,” he said. “Now in two clicks or so I transfer that data into a spreadsheet we already use, and it takes about 15 minutes.”
Recently, Argosy was bought out by a non-profit university. The new leadership wanted to understand the types of services students were providing to the community. “We had to do a report where we looked at how many hours our students were spending at non-profits around our location — we would not have been able to provide that information with such short notice before Time2Track,” Howell said.
About the College of Clinical Psychology at Argosy University
The Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) degree in Clinical Psychology program prepares individuals to provide therapeutic and assessment services to individuals, families, groups and organizations. The Master of Arts (MA) degree provides a basic foundation in the principles of Clinical Psychology. Training in a variety of theoretical orientations and specialty areas are represented across 10 individualized programs. Common to these training programs is a large network of shared university resources, a common set of training principles and a legacy of over 30 years of professional school training.
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