Breaking Down Barriers in Early Intervention

Early Intervention Providers (EIPs) are at the forefront of helping children with autism and their families navigate social-emotional development. However, their work often comes with logistical and technological challenges that can impede progress. Many EIPs work in home settings where reliable Wi-Fi isn’t always available, and they need secure, easy-to-use tools for data collection, reflection, and coaching. This is where TORSH has made a transformative impact.

Bridging the Technology Gap

The Building Interactive Social Communication Project (BISC), an innovative early intervention program through Indiana University, turned to TORSH to address key field challenges. EIPs needed a way to record video reflections and review them in real-time without storing data on their devices—a requirement to maintain HIPAA and FERPA compliance. With TORSH, they can:

• Capture video in the field without needing an internet connection.
• Securely store and manage intervention data, ensuring privacy and accessibility for the right team members.
• Engage in structured video reflection, allowing providers to assess and adjust their approaches for better outcomes.
• Collaborate seamlessly, connecting field providers, mentors, and researchers to improve intervention fidelity and effectiveness.

The TORSH Talent platform shows recent video uploads

The Impact: Measurable Improvements for Providers, Parents, and Children

Since integrating TORSH, BISC has reported significant improvements across multiple areas:

• Provider Success: EIPs have quickly adopted the system with minimal training time, allowing them to focus more on their work with families.
• Parent Empowerment: TORSH enables parents to actively participate in their child’s development, fostering a stronger parent-child bond and increasing self-efficacy.
• Child Development: Children demonstrate increased motivation to engage socially and take a more active role in their learning journey.

What Makes BISC’s Approach Unique?

Two key aspects set BISC apart from other early intervention models:

1. A Unique Developmental Sequence – BISC provides a structured approach that EIPs can easily implement. Providers see early progress, reinforcing their confidence and effectiveness.
2. Mediated Learning – The program focuses on fostering an internal desire in children to engage socially and learn, rather than relying solely on external motivation.

Seamless Implementation with TORSH

A major concern for the BISC team was the potential learning curve in adopting a new technology. However, the transition to TORSH was remarkably smooth. Providers quickly adapted to the platform, eliminating the need for additional expensive hardware like iPads. One of the program leaders shared their initial skepticism:

“I was expecting it to take a lot of startup time and a learning gap with providers, and it didn’t. Your team did so well with the implementation. In the back of my mind, I kept thinking, what if this doesn’t work, and we have to buy iPads again (and never get them back)? But thank goodness, everything is smooth.”

The Future of Early Intervention with TORSH

As BISC continues its work, the team seeks to expand research efforts and scale implementation with TORSH. By leveraging data-driven insights and enhancing collaboration between intervention providers, mentors, and researchers, BISC aims to refine and improve intervention strategies that make a lasting impact on children and families.

TORSH is more than just a coaching tool—it’s a solution that empowers early intervention teams to work more effectively, drive measurable change, and ultimately help children learn how to learn.

For more information about BISC and how to participate in their upcoming Early Intervention research, click here. 

To learn more about TORSH and see a demo of the Talent platform, click here.

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The TORSH Talent platform will initially be used at the Boh Center’s Feeding Therapy Clinic as well as with participants of their Developmental Assessment program. The clinic works with children who have trouble eating due to pickiness, G-tube dependencies, endangerment, or other factors. At the Feeding Therapy Clinic, specialists work to minimize the challenges that accompany clinic feedings, which often involves observations by many different physicians and/or clinicians. These observations are captured on video and shared with the many members of each patient’s treatment team. Patients who cannot physically visit the Center, are assessed and treated through a program called Developmental Assessments, via video. Through this process, parents/guardians provide videos, usually around five, for clinicians and physicians to observe, assess, treat and support the patient and families

TORSH Talent’s HIPAA-compliant offering provides both programs with a secure, easy-to-use platform for video engagements and observations to take place. The results of this more efficient process are time saved by providers, expanding their capacity to work with more patients, while enhancing their interaction with parents through specific evidence-based feedback. 

The Boh Center is already looking to future opportunities to utilize other features of the Torsh platform by digitizing evaluation forms, creating a resource center for providers and parents, as well as expanding access to other clinics and programs. 

Ochsner has a reputation for leveraging cutting-edge technology to the benefit of its patients. We at Torsh are honored to work with this team of innovators in support of their continued quest for improved patient engagement, process improvements, and a commitment to patient data security.   

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About Torsh

Founded in 2012, Torsh began as a video collaboration tool that has since evolved into a full-service platform used by educators, providers, families, and specialists to improve outcomes and services for children and students nationwide. The platform allows for facilitation via both in-person and video observations by empowering users to easily and conveniently self-assess and reflect on practice and behaviors, receive meaningful standards-aligned coaching, richly collaborate with mentors and peers, quickly access exemplar video and file examples, and measure critical evidence-based data insights. TORSH Talent also seamlessly integrates with third-party platforms like zoom, Canvas, and Salesforce. TORSH Talent is HIPAA- and FERPA-compliant and serves tens of thousands of users in over 2,000 centers, schools, universities, and organizations in the United States. For more information, visit https://torsh.co. 

About The Michael R. Boh Center for Child Development

The Michael R. Boh Center for Child Development is dedicated to improving the lives of children and adolescents with developmental disorders through comprehensive interdisciplinary team evaluations, integrated treatment protocols, high-quality evidence-based patient care, the direction of special education services, and professional education and research. For more information, please visit https://www.ochsner.org/boh

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State agencies and universities have been utilizing TORSH Talent to engage early intervention practitioners, provide family coaching and develop educators since 2012. As use has increased, so has the need for a HIPAA-compliant version of the online professional development platform to further expand its effectiveness to programs that require this additional level of security. As a result, the development of the first iteration of a HIPAA-compliant version, known as TORSH Talent HIPAA-Secure (Talent HS) was quietly launched in January 2018. Today, Torsh is excited to expand access to all higher education, early education, or early intervention organizations, agencies, or institutions requiring a HIPAA-compliant solution.  

Talent HS serves a variety of organizations, from the Florida State University Autism Institute to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Winnie Dunn, a Distinguished Professor of the Department of Occupational Therapy shares how Talent HS has been integral to the success of programs run by the University of Missouri:

“Our research requires that we verify who was implementing coaching practices with fidelity. We verified fidelity thanks to TORSH. We captured coaching sessions on video to detect essential elements in each session, giving people remote, real-time feedback for growth. TORSH offered data that allowed us to determine those who were providing evidence-based care and those who needed more support. As a result, we raised the quality of services, efficiently focused our supervision, and created documentation for both studies and oversight agencies.“

For many programs similar and dissimilar to Dr. Dunn’s, Talent HS is essential for building more efficient and effective teams and services. The development team at TORSH has worked tirelessly to ensure that the HIPAA-secure platform matches the functionality of the original version without sacrificing any of the features in order to meet compliance. Our already tech-centered world has become increasingly reliant on virtual interactions; Talent HS is the key to practitioners and educators providing the same, if not higher, quality of support to children and families.

Torsh is excited to continue reaching more organizations in need of a highly secure platform while continuing to evolve Talent HS to further meet the needs of our users. To learn more about the features and benefits available on TORSH Talent HS, visit https://www.torsh.co/early-intervention-hipaa/.

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