VGPM 1.81 continue our mission to Protect Your Purpose by closing the gap between the data your clinicians collect and the decisions they make with it. These two releases put a goal's recent progress one tap away during a session, stop honoring payers from rejecting legitimate same-day services as duplicates, and give the comment field on your Plans of Care the room it always needed.
See a Goal's Last 30 Days Without Leaving the Session
A clinician mid-session has the least information at the moment they most need it. They have just recorded a trial block, and the decision in front of them is whether to keep going, change the prompting, or move to a different target. That depends on the recent trend, not the single number they just entered. Checking it used to mean leaving the data-collection flow for the Program Book and navigating back, which in practice meant most people did not check at all.
Every goal card in the session screen now has a Progress Chart button. Clicking it expands that goal's last 30 calendar days directly beneath the card.
What's Included
- The chart matches the Program Book chart for the same goal: same measurement units, same goal and mastery line, same aggregation, so the in-session view never contradicts the one you review later
- The chart refreshes itself when you submit an entry, so the point you just recorded appears without reopening anything
- A refresh button re-pulls data on demand, useful when several team members are entering data on the same client during a meeting
- A fullscreen view for dense data, or for showing progress to a supervisor or a parent in the room
- One chart open at a time, which keeps the screen responsive on the tablets and phones this actually runs on
- A clear empty state when a goal has no data in the window, instead of a broken or misleading graph
Why This Matters
Treatment fidelity depends on clinicians acting on trends rather than isolated data points, and that only happens if the trend is visible where the work is. For the RBT running four sessions a day from a tablet in a family's living room, this is the difference between an informed adjustment and a guess.
Learn more: ABA Data Collection
Automatic 77 Modifiers on Duplicate Same-Day Services
Two therapy blocks for the same client on the same day, with the same billing code, is routine in intensive ABA. A morning session and an afternoon session. Two providers splitting a long day. The service happened twice, it was documented twice, and it is payable twice. But to a payer's claim scrubber, two identical lines look like an accidental double-bill, and the second one comes back denied.
The industry answer is modifier 77, "repeat procedure by another provider," which tells the payer the line is a legitimate repeat. The catch has always been that someone has to notice the duplicate and add it. VGPM applies it automatically at submission for payers that honor it.
What's Included
- Duplicate detection reads the claim the way the payer will see it: one line per grouped set of identical items, plus each ungrouped item
- Detection reaches beyond the claim in front of you, checking already-sent claims for the same client and insurance, so a service billed last week is recognized as the original
- When the code and date were already billed on a sent claim, every line in the set is marked as a repeat; when the duplicates are only within one claim, one line stays plain as the original
- Lines already carrying the modifier are left alone, so resubmitting a claim never stacks it
- A duplicate line whose four modifier slots are already full goes out as-is and is logged, rather than VGPM silently dropping one of your existing modifiers to make room
- Every automatic application is recorded on the claim timeline with the billing code and date, so an auditor can always see why a modifier appears on a line nobody typed it into
Why This Matters
Same-day duplicate denials are a quiet kind of revenue leak. Nothing was done wrong: the session happened, the note was written, the claim went out. It comes back denied anyway, sits in a queue, gets corrected by hand, and gets resubmitted weeks later, if someone gets to it before the timely-filing window closes. Applying the modifier at submission means those lines go out payable the first time, which is what ABA billing software should be doing on your behalf. It is the same principle behind the automatic claim attachments in 1.79: a claim should leave your office complete.
How to Enable
Applying modifier 77 to a payer that does not honor it causes its own rejections, so this is switched on per payer rather than globally.
- Identify the payers that accept modifier 77 for repeat same-day services
- Contact VGPM support to enable automatic 77 modifiers for those payers
- Review the claim timeline on the first few affected claims to confirm the behavior matches what that payer expects
Prevention only covers the payers you enable it for. For the denials that still arrive, VG Soft Co's ABA claim denial management service works them with payer-specific appeals and root-cause analysis, as part of its revenue cycle management offering.
A Real Editor for Plan of Care Goal Comments
Goal comments on a Plan of Care are read by the two audiences that matter most: the payer reviewing medical necessity, and the guardian reading the plan for their child. Until now they were typed into a single-line field wedged into the goals table, where a two-sentence note scrolled past a sliver of visible text. BCBAs use this field on nearly every plan, and they could not see what they had written.
Comment entry now opens in a focused editor from each goal row.
What's Included
- A dedicated editor with the goal's title at the top and a text area that grows as you type, so a multi-sentence note is fully visible while you write it
- Enter accepts the comment, Shift+Enter adds a line for structuring a longer note, and an explicit Accept button does the same as Enter
- Closing without accepting discards the edit, so an accidental dismissal cannot overwrite a saved comment
- A trimmed one-line preview beneath each goal title, prefixed with a comment icon, so you can see at a glance which goals carry notes
- The standalone Comment column is gone, and the freed width went to the goal name, which matters when your goal titles are full mastery criteria
- Line breaks survive into the submitted document, and comment text is escaped before rendering, so a clinical note appears exactly as typed
Comments stay editable after a plan is submitted, which is behavior practices already depended on and which we deliberately preserved.
Why This Matters
A cramped field you cannot proofread produces typos and truncated notes in a payer-facing record. That is a compliance exposure and an authorization risk sitting inside a text box. Giving the field room is a small change to build and a real reduction in the number of ways a Plan of Care can go out wrong.
Your Current and Next Event, From Any Page
Clinicians moving between back-to-back sessions previously had to open the Calendar and click into an event every time they wanted to start the session they were in or check what was next. Two buttons in the top bar now carry that information everywhere in VGPM.
What's Included
- A current-event button when something is happening now, and a next-event button for what's coming later today, each showing its time
- Both colored by event type, matching the Calendar's color coding, so a therapy session and a supervision block are distinguishable at a glance
- Clicking the current event enters the session when the type allows it, and otherwise opens the event's details
- Hover text naming the client, the event type, and what the click will do, so there are no surprises
- Buttons that stay accurate as the day progresses without a page reload, and that disappear entirely when there is nothing to show
- Icon-only collapse on narrow screens, because the people who need this most are on their phones
Why This Matters
Entering a session drops from five interactions to one. That sounds trivial until you multiply it by four sessions a day across every clinician on staff, and it lands hardest on the roles with the least patience for software. Learn more: ABA Scheduling
Three New Standard Billing Codes
Three codes are now seeded into every VGPM instance, so they appear in the billing code list without anyone creating them by hand:
- 0362T (ABA, evaluation) Behavior identification supporting assessment
- 0373T (ABA, therapy) Adaptive behavior treatment with protocol modification
- H0031 (Mental Health, evaluation) Mental health assessment by a non-physician
The two ABA codes cover technology-assisted services delivered on site with two or more technicians present for a client who exhibits destructive behavior, in a customized environment. All three bill in 15-minute units. If your practice delivers these services, or is adding a mental health service line, the codes are ready to price against your payers.
One honest caveat: a code being available is not the same as it being payable. You still need to add it to each insurance with the correct rate and confirm that payer covers it.
VGPM is the all-in-one ABA practice management platform built for streamlined operations: billing-optimized, automation-first, and simple enough for teams to learn in hours, at a flat $50 per staff per month. These two releases put clinical context where clinical decisions get made, and stop your billing team from re-working claims that were correct the first time.
