How Ascent 121 Got Monthly Reports Down to Four Questions.
Ascent 121 is an Indianapolis nonprofit that stayed on paper charts until 2019. Staff now answer four questions, and PIMSY builds the monthly report from data already in the chart.
They pretty much answer four questions and then the system does the rest.
Megan Jessup-Smyth, COOAscent 121
Challenge
Ascent 121 kept paper charts for six years while counseling survivors of human trafficking, mostly ages 8 to 24. By 2019 the agency was bigger, handwritten charts were harder to keep accurate, and the cheaper systems Megan looked at shipped with locked templates.
Solution
She chose PIMSY in 2019. PIMSY put their treatment plan templates in the chart and formatted monthly reports to pull from across the system, so staff aren’t writing long narratives from scratch. Kori on the PIMSY team stayed with them through the build.
Results
Staff answer four questions, and PIMSY does the rest of the monthly report. Those reports used to be a writing project. Now the data is already in the chart, and PIMSY assembles it. They also built their own assessment instruments inside PIMSY.
Paper charts until the agency got bigger
Ascent 121 is a small Indianapolis nonprofit that kept paper charts for six years while counseling survivors of human trafficking, mostly ages 8 to 24. Staff provide therapy and case management, plus peer mentoring, and they run residential programming with a partner agency. About 25 people work there, mostly full-time, with students and contractors mixed in.
They stayed on paper until 2019. By then the agency was bigger, and handwritten charts were harder to keep accurate.
Once they could afford an EHR, COO and co-founder Megan Jessup-Smyth started looking. She sat through demos and sandboxes.
Most of the systems she looked at already had case notes and time tracking. Ascent 121 had already built their own assessments and treatment templates, because there isn’t much of an outside playbook for this work. They needed software that could hold that, especially the monthly reports.
Some of the cheaper systems shipped with locked templates, so Megan passed on those.
Their templates, in the chart
She chose PIMSY in 2019.
At the time that we started, PIMSY was still actually a little archaic, and we still chose them because it offered a whole lot of stuff that other people didn’t.
Megan Jessup-Smyth, LCSW, COO and Co-Founder
Implementation took a while, but Kori on the PIMSY team stayed with them through the build. Seven years later, Megan still calls Kori her favorite person in the world.
They sent PIMSY the treatment plan templates they already used, the ones tied to their instruments and their phase-based program. PIMSY put those templates in the chart so the work they’d already designed could live in the system instead of Word docs.
PIMSY also formatted monthly reports to pull from across the system, so staff aren’t writing long narratives from scratch.
Training ran over an extended stretch so a small team could absorb a new EHR. Original onboarding landed well, and staff now use the portal heavily for day-to-day work.
Four questions, and PIMSY does the rest
Staff answer four questions, and PIMSY does the rest of the monthly report. Those reports used to be a writing project. Now the data is already in the chart, and PIMSY assembles it.
Surveys were another gap they couldn’t close elsewhere, so Ascent 121 built their own assessment instruments inside PIMSY. Megan can run reports on individual surveys, work the data in the system, or export to Excel when she needs to go further.
When something crops up, support responds, and updates often land in the background, which fits a small nonprofit with limited bandwidth. Every so often someone asks if a feature exists, and Kori tells them PIMSY added it years ago.
| Measure | Detail |
|---|---|
| Monthly report | Staff answer four questions; PIMSY does the rest |
| Before PIMSY | Reports were a writing project from paper charts |
| Paper charts | Six years, until 2019 |
| Staff | About 25, mostly full-time, plus students and contractors |
| Work | Therapy, case management, peer mentoring, and residential programming with a partner agency |
| Clients | Survivors of human trafficking, mostly ages 8 to 24 |
| On PIMSY | Since 2019 |
| Location | Indianapolis, IN |
Ready to see this on your monthly reports?
Ascent 121 needed reports, surveys, and templates built for the population they serve, and PIMSY built those with them. Schedule a demo and we’ll show you what that customization looks like for a practice your size.
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