John F. Kennedy University Finds a Single Solution for Tracking Clinical Hours Across Disciplines
John F. Kennedy University Finds a Single Solution for Tracking Clinical Hours Across Disciplines
The Challenge
Improving Accuracy and Access to Information
Alvin McLean, Ph.D., Associate Dean and Co-Director of Clinical Training for JFK University’s PsyD program, said before starting with Time2Track about five years ago, students were tracking their clinical hours via paper and pencil. “We’d input the data into an Excel spreadsheet, which would ultimately go into a FileMaker Pro app, then we’d summarize the data for accreditation purposes and students would use the data to apply for internships,” he explained.
The process was time-intensive for both students and staff. “It required a lot of data quality review — we’d frequently uncover input errors,” said McLean. Staff wanted to reduce these errors, find a quicker way to produce reports for American Psychological Association (APA) commission on accreditation and find a system that students could easily use to facilitate their application to APA internship sites.
Results
Implementing Time2Track allowed JFKU to:
Reduce time spent tracking hours by 40-50%,
saving time for both students and staff
Use a single solution
to track clinical hours for multiple programs
Perform special analyses
that provide valuable data for grant applications
The hallmark I’m seeing across disciplines is the ability for Time2Track to meet the needs of the customer.
The Solution
Streamlined time tracking and access to detailed data
When JFK University started using Time2Track to record clinical psychology doctoral program hours, both staff and students were impressed. “The program maps directly to what’s needed for students to apply for APA internships,” said McLean. “The APA internship application process requires students to input data into the program in a very specific manner, and Time2Track created summary sheets students can download that match the requirements exactly.”
In addition, Time2Track allows the university to aggregate data to report to accrediting agencies for various programs, such as the APA for the Clinical Psychology PsyD, the Association of Sports Psychology for the master’s in sports psychology or the Board of Behavioral Science for the master’s in marriage and family therapy. “Not only does Time2Track allow us to track students’ hours of clinical work, it also has built in the clinical supervision evaluation tools we need to assess students’ performance,” said McLean.
The University’s Outcome
In addition to saving time for students and staff in tracking hours and evaluating student performance, McLean said the data Time2Track provides had other surprising benefits. “The system can give you aggregate data across multiple sites, so you can compare how well you’re performing against national norms. You wouldn’t find that capability in other tracking tools. It makes a difference for us to have one tool we can use across our academic programs.”
The system also captures data the university uses to apply for grants, including information on specific populations, such as the percentage of patients with certain diagnoses or the number from underserved communities. “With Time2Track, we can very easily generate reports of the demographics of the patients we serve and how frequently we’re working with them — for grants, that’s been a real asset,” McLean said.
About John F. Kennedy University
For over 50 years, John F. Kennedy University, a nonprofit affiliate of the National University System, has offered undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs. Today, the University’s three colleges provide higher education opportunities to 1,200 professionals, while the Continuing Education division provides professional development education to more than 2,500 individuals per year throughout California’s San Francisco Bay Area.
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