How to switch from Motivity: programs, data and cutover

Why the program library is the hard part

An ABA agency’s program and goal library is years of clinical design: targets, prompt hierarchies, mastery criteria, phase conventions. Session history matters for audits; the library matters every single session from Monday morning onward. Budget the migration effort accordingly: the mapping week belongs to your clinical leads, not just the office manager.

Program structure is the part that needs mapping

Motivity migrations are usually straightforward on the client and staff side and interesting on the program side, because program libraries are structured differently in every system that has one.

Expect mapping rather than a screen-identical arrival. A goal that exists as one record in one system may be a goal with child targets in another; mastery criteria that were a dropdown in one may be free text in the other. None of that is destructive, but it is a decision per field rather than a checkbox, and it is better made deliberately during the export than discovered afterwards.

Budget roughly an afternoon of cleanup for a typical library rather than a services engagement, and do it with the person who built the library rather than the person who administers the software. The columns the program import expects are listed in how the import centre works.

What Motivity’s exports give you

Motivity’s help centre describes four places to export from (the organization, a single learner, a program, or a single target) and the narrower the export, the smaller and faster the file. Organization owners can export for every learner; other users only for learners on their own teams.

• Session times across all learners, with dates and start and end times, as CSV.
• Target outcomes, opportunities and measures per session, as CSV: the raw numbers behind every graph.
• Note data as CSV, which Motivity notes covers signed notes only. Get every outstanding note signed before you run it.
• Session notes as a zip of PDFs, and charts as a PDF of a learner’s graphs.
• Reports from the reports module as CSV or PDF, if your role can see that tab.

Arrives as documents: the signed session notes and graph PDFs: the audit trail, attached per client.

Stays behind: claims Motivity’s billing module has already batched and posted, which finish where they started, and the habit of watching session data arrive while a session is still running, which Motivity describes as data instantly accessible to anyone with access. Supervisors who relied on that move to scheduled overlap observations: plan that supervision pattern change before cutover, not after.

The weekend cutover

Freeze library edits a week out, map and import programs, verify a sample caseload with the BCBAs who own it, reconcile authorization balances against payer statements, then run Monday’s sessions in the new system. RBTs should see their Tuesday clients with the same programs, same targets, same phase. That is the test the migration passes or fails.

If the decision is not yet made, the Motivity comparison covers per-learner against per-seat pricing, which is the difference that usually decides it. The destination is ABA practice management software, and ABA billing covers what happens to units after the move.