ATU726 – Orchestrate AMS with Mike Toguchi and Jerit Sciorra

Hi, this is Mike Toguchi, and I’m the Chief Strategy Officer of eResources for the Orchestrate AMS.

And I’m Jerit Sciorra, product lead for Orchestrate AMS. And this is your assistive technology update.

Hello and welcome to your assistive technology update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 726 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on April 25th, 2025. On today’s show, we’re super excited to welcome the folks from Orchestrate AMS on to tell us all about how this amazing tool can help with streamlining disability services. We’re also excited to be joined by BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the show. Listeners, our next INDATA full day training will be coming up on May 22nd, 2025, and it’s titled Mobile Device Assistive Technology. This training will be 100% online, but you do have to register.

I’ll put a link down to Eastersealstech.com so that you can get to all of our full day trainings and register for Mobile Device Assistive Technology coming on May 22nd. Members of our team here at the Assistive Technology Program at Easterseals Crossroads will present on built-in technologies for iOS devices, Android devices, and other mobile technology. We’ll also be joined by our partners from Intrac. Intrac at Indiana Relay not only sponsors the captions to the show, but also to a lot of other amazing things related to helping individuals with mobile technology with communication. They’ll present on some of these programs as well as some amazing tools that are out there to help individuals access mobile technology. And we’re also very excited that we’ll be joined by our friends from BridgingApps who you will hear later on this show as well. BridgingApps will be here to talk about their amazing search tool, how you can really look for some great different apps, also to talk about some of their favorite apps.

So if you’re interested in learning more about mobile device assistive technology, do join us for our next INDATA full day training on May 22nd, 2025 from nine A.M. to three P.M. eastern Time. Again, this online training does offer CEUs and is free to attend, but you must register before the training. We’ll put a link down in the show notes so that you can check it out for yourself. Listeners, this year, National Assistive Technology Awareness Day falls on Wednesday, April 30th. National Assistive Technology, or AT Awareness Day, commemorates the importance and vital role AT plays in the lives of people with disabilities and older adults. This day reinforces the necessary support and funding the federal government provides to ensure people receive the assistive technology necessary to engage in education, employment, and community living. Assistive technology allows individuals with disabilities and older adults to be included in their communities and in inclusive classrooms and workplaces, and these devices are necessities, not luxury items.

National Assistive Technology Awareness Day also provides an opportunity to commend assistive technology specialists and program coordinators for their hard work and dedication to serving individuals with disabilities who are in need of finding the proper AT to meet their individual needs, and professional organizations and researchers dedicated to facilitating the access and acquisition of assistive technology for individuals with disabilities and older adults in need of AT devices. Please join us here at the INDATA Project as we celebrate National AT Awareness Day. And if you just happen to be in the state of Indiana or even central Indiana, please do stop by. We will be hosting an open house in our adaptive lab to celebrate at Awareness Day on Wednesday, April 30th from four P.M. to six P.M. You can tour our lab, learn more about our programs, and also meet the amazing staff that make up the INDATA Project, our clinical program, our digital literacy program, our home modification program, the ATLAS Project, and so many other programs that fall under the blanket of our assistive technology program here at Easterseals Crossroads.

So listeners, whether you’re doing it here, in person, at our open house, or at home or out with your colleagues, please do celebrate AT Awareness Day, celebrating those amazing devices, and maybe even more important, the individuals that work with them, on them, and ensure that those devices make it to market and make it into the hands of the individuals who can actually use them, and that they have the skills necessary to be able to use them to meet whatever goals it is they’re looking for. Thank you for listening, and happy AT Awareness Day. Listeners, next up on the show, we welcome back our friends from BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with BridgingApps and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called Seeing AI. Seeing AI is a completely free app that describes the world around you using artificial intelligence via your device’s built-in camera. This app helps people with vision impairments understand what is around them. It has 11 different camera functions to assist with a variety of daily tasks, like short text, which reads short text and documents placed in front of the device. The app can even be taught to identify faces and emotions. Other notable functions of the app include photo descriptions, product information, recognizing currency, teaching Seeing AI to your personal objects and follow audio cues to find them later, and identifying colors.

Seeing AI is great for people who are blind, have visual impairments, or have color blindness. It opens up the world to users who are unable to see on their own. Users appreciate that Seeing AI is both free and accessible with so many options to meet their every need. The app is also available in numerous languages, including English, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, and Japanese. Seeing AI is currently available for both Android and iOS devices and is free to download. For more information on this app and others like it, visit bridgingapps.org.

Today listeners, we are super excited to welcome Mike and Jerit to the show to learn all about Orchestrate AMS and how it can assist disability services at universities to better serve their students. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Josh.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, I’m looking forward to getting to talking about everything, Orchestrate AMS and all the other really cool stuff. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourselves?

I’m Jerit Sciorra. I am the product lead here at Orchestrate AMS. I’ve worked on developing a product offering and our solution.

And I’m Mike Toguchi, I’m the Chief strategy Officer at eResources. And I oversee our Orchestrate division, our application system, and the tools that we utilize to help students and other users with the AMS solution.

Awesome. And Mike, you brought up that there’s some different divisions. I know we’re here to talk about Orchestrate AMS mostly, but big picture, can you explain the company and the organization to us?

Yeah, absolutely. eResources is a full service technology firm. We’ve been around for over 25 years. We do digital transformation through marketing, branding and website projects. We have a managed IT services department that handles security, MSP support. And of course, we have our Orchestrate platform for online applications, workflow automation, and a wide range of things that go through higher education, secondary education, nonprofits, community service organizations, associations, and corporate partners. And so we have a wide range of services that are designed to provide a turnkey solution for any of our partners.

Very nice. And as I said, the real reason we had you gentlemen always to talk about Orchestrate AMS. So start us off with just what is it?

Sure, Josh. Orchestrate AMS is a comprehensive software solution. It’s designed to streamline and enhance the management of student accessibility accommodations at colleges and universities. Our platform, Josh, offers a centralized solution for managing accommodation requests, featuring automated workflows that streamline the approval process with notifications, and integrates with student information systems.

What we found from working with schools and all the other organization types that I mentioned was that they were really struggling to provide the services that either students or end users needed. They were managing things in spreadsheets or using old software, and that led to just a great deal of frustration, poor communication. Students, parents, caregivers, faculty, all the different audience types were really not getting the help and service that they need through the different assistive technology and other pieces like Jared had mentioned. And so we really leveraged what we had done through Orchestrate broadly to create a solution that was designed to help students and other users with disabilities, to provide those accommodations, and to just really promote accessibility throughout the ecosystem.

No, you brought up a great point. It seems like, yeah, a lot of times, those systems are, like you said, an Excel spreadsheet, or, “Well, Sally always handled that, and Sally left, and so now what do I do and how do I get all these things put together?” So we talked about accommodations, and that can mean a lot of different things. So what all types of things can be managed by the Orchestrate AMS system?

Sure. It’s primarily used to manage accommodations that are given out to students at colleges and universities, whether they’re exam accommodations, testing accommodations, housing and dining accommodations, any type of accommodations that apply to the student, and even the employees at the university as well. So any type of accommodation, that’s what it’s designed for. And the system has an automated workflow with it that has approvals and notifications that go along with it. So students submit their documentation, a specialist at the college or university would review that documentation, give the student the necessary accommodations. The student would then, in their portal, log in and see a nice letter that has all their information for their accommodations. At the same time, to make communication easier, the faculty member is notified that this student has accommodations and they have the letter. So there’s really a good deal of streamlined communication between all audiences.

Josh, another thing about that is just the idea of when we’re thinking about accessible technology, what Jerit has designed and created here is something that really streamlines that process so that students or users aren’t frustrated when they’re trying to get a screen reader, a text-to-speech device, a smart pen, and all of the cool gadgets and things that are out there that are really available to help folks. They were universities, organizations, just struggling, they’re overwhelmed with the amount of requests, like you mentioned. One person was just used to handling it or they had it in a spreadsheet somewhere. And this really provides an environment that helps them track it, have an audit trail, the better communication that Jerit mentioned, and just overall be in compliance with the regulations and laws they need to be to help them provide these services.

Yeah, it sounds like it gives them a great one-stop shop. I don’t have to talk about housing for my accommodations there or student services for my accommodations there. For some universities, of course, they have disability services that may or may not be able to handle that all. But then I love that it seems like a lot of times, sometimes the breakdown can be informing the professor that this accommodation’s allowed and been approved. So I love that it streamlines and continues, I want to say continuity of care, but that’s not the right wording, but that as a student, I get my information in there, and then it just goes to the correct parties and continues on down the line.

Yeah, that’s correct, Josh. There’s one central student record and it will be your record the whole lifetime you’re at this college and university. So it’ll contain all the courses that you’ve taken, all the letters and all the accommodations that you had. So it really makes it easy to see everything that they’ve given you for compliance reasons as well, all the documents, all the audit trail of any type of action that the specialists have taken when they’ve spoken to you, when you’ve got an email and stuff like that is all contained on your record as well.

One of the things I think that’s really been helpful is just the overall flexibility and scalability that our platform, that Orchestrated AMS provides that a group gets a really solid solution with all the core features that they need. But if they have special needs for providing services to people in the community or what a nonprofit is doing versus how university might handle it, everyone’s got a little bit of a different process. And our workflow tools are able to accommodate those to give them a way to manage them and utilize their own unique process without having to build something special each time. So we can help them grow with the ever-changing needs in this environment.

Nice. So if we’re talking about a very small community college or a very large university, it can be scaled to meet the needs of those students with the available resources of the school?

Right. At the conference at ATA, we talked to a number of school districts, folks that were like, “Oh, hey, we’ve got 10 schools in our district. We would love to talk to you about how to potentially create something that helps all of them,” whereas some other folks may show up and just say, “Hey, we’re a small community-based organization, but we’re underwater trying to manage all the requests that we’re getting and all the services we want to provide.” And so you can be as large and enterprise as you want, or it can be something that’s much smaller and scaled that way.

I just have to ask, I assume that it’s able to integrate with the university or the company, the organization’s IT system they already have in place?

Correct. We integrate with the university’s SIS for their courses and faculty feed and whatever we need for their SSO, the single sign on as well. So the student logs in with their university email address, authenticates, and then gets logged into our platform, same thing for all the faculty members as well. What’s up?

I was just going to say, do you want to say SIS is student information system or database so that it’s clearer for if somebody doesn’t know the acronym?

I think I mentioned it earlier.

Okay. Gotcha. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you then.

No, that’s perfectly fine. Trust me, I live in the world of acronyms. So sometimes, I just smile and nod. But no, it’s always good to get them out there. So I love that it does work in, and I love that I don’t have another password to remember anything like that. So I like that you’re keeping the accessibility in the hands of the actual user.

And even outside of the university environment, we know that there’s going to be secondary ad or-profits or associations and corporate partners that have HubSpot or Salesforce or some other CRM that they’re utilizing marketing platforms for email. And our platforms very API friendly. So it’s really designed for us to go in and find out what tools are they using and how can we plug that in to make it the most efficient process possible, because that’s really what we’re trying to do is find a way to make a lot of overburdened, overworked folks that are trying their best to deliver services to give them an efficient mechanism to do that.

Yeah, because I know that’s definitely one of the biggest challenges, I don’t know where to start. From the student or even from, like you mentioned, maybe the employee or the team member with a disability that needs accommodations is where do I start, and then where does it go from there? And I got to ask, and maybe this is something you can tell me or not just off the top of my head, if I’m a student, an employer or something that requests an accommodation, can I see where that process is down the line? Can I track how things are moving along?

Yeah. Absolutely. You would see the status of where your accommodation is and any type of notes, if there’s action that’s required from you at that time, if they’re waiting on additional documentation, you’ll know that, or if someone is reviewing that, you would know what staff member is reviewing that as well.

And a number of our systems have automated emails integrated to trigger. So if a person’s status changed from my accommodation is in review to it’s been approved, they can get a message right away. We can do text messaging integration for some of our younger audience. So the communication is as transparent and automated as possible.

That’s great, because I know for some folks, it’s just, “I made this request and it just went off in the ether. I have no idea where it is.” And especially if there’s more paperwork needed, more documentation or things like that, to be able to get an alert and be working on that is always a great, great tool. So Jerit, what are some of the more maybe advanced features of Orchestrate AMS, maybe some, oh, I don’t know, some add-ons or some deeper features for folks who might need them?

Yeah, sure. We have a number of additional modules that are available with our system. We have a module for our testing center management. This is a dedicated module to schedule and manage all type of testing accommodations for students. So a centralized scheduling system for exams for students that have accommodation, they could see what student is in what testing room, what [inaudible 00:18:19] might be giving the student the exam. And for students that need additional exam time or additional break time, all that is calculated there for them. We also can manage furniture and accessible technology items, which is a big expanding need now.

A couple of years ago, some of our clients were managing note-taking, for example, with actual physical note-takers in the classes. Now, with all the AI and other type of devices out there, they’re just giving folks a recorder or access to some add-on that they might have, or a scribe pen, for example. And our system can help seamlessly track that information. We also have a number of other custom form modules so they can add on and build additional forms, questions and things that they might need to ask their students as well.

Another thing I’d add to that, Jerit, is the advanced reporting, query building and just overall analytics that the platform offers. Certainly one of the things that we come across at all levels is the need to have access to data in a lot of different formats. And our system provides executive summaries, it provides dashboard with visualizations, and it gives the people using it the tools to be able to build their own spreadsheets full of the data so that they can deliver the information to, whether it’s a board, whether it’s to a supervisor, whether it’s to a customer or a parent, or it could be responding to legislative or regulatory needs, even, for end of the year reports and things like that. We’ve just got a really robust set of tools that allow for that reporting.

Nice. And Mike, just for an example, what information might I want to track for that report?

So for example, if you wanted to run a report that said, looking for people in this, splice and dice it by my calendar year, my academic year, my fiscal year, how many users or students did we serve? What devices did each one use? What’s the grand total, the aggregate total of those devices? That type of situation where you would then be able to have a great picture of the data, some of our groups like Jerit work specifically with ones that are looking at what’s our response time? Are we providing good service to the folks that are our mission? And have we cut this down in a way that from day one, when they submit that request, how long before we get them through our workflow to an approved setup? So there’s really an unlimited number of ways you can use that for the tracking, for the reporting.

It’s just a matter of what data is critical to you, who needs it, and in what format. Our organization, we take security. It’s a priority for us. We go through numerous audits, whether it’s a sock to type to PCI DSS, just HIPAA training, everything we can possibly do to ensure that the user’s data is secure, that their privacy is taken care of, and that these organizations that are taking care of them, that everything on their end is locked up in a way that helps them with compliance and make sure that they can feel safe utilizing our platform. It’s something that we’re really proud of our security posture. We’ve never had, knock on wood, a data incident with anything related to Orchestrate, and we’re doing everything we can to stay ahead of the curve. There’s always risks and threats. And so it’s important to have a partner that has their eye on that.

Very, very cool. Jerit, Mike, you might both have one of these, but could you tell me a success story of someone using Orchestrate AMS? And that can be from maybe the student side requesting an accommodation, or even from the manager side, and maybe just how Orchestrate AMS has really been able to help them out.

Mike, you want to take this one? I’m not sure how we want to…

Yeah. Yeah. So one of the universities that we work with in California, Josh, their success story is at all the levels that you mentioned. I think one of the most important ones for them from a leadership standpoint is they had been using older platforms that were in the marketplace. They were not meeting their needs. And implementing this, not just the core features, but also some unique and custom elements that they wanted to add in, they were able to really free up their team. And it’s something that they tell us over and over again that their budget was not getting any larger, they weren’t able to hire more people, but they were able to make their process more efficient, to serve more students. And even as the number of accommodation requests grew, they were able to really service more folks. And that led to great ROI for them, long-term savings that wasn’t showing up anywhere.

And it also meant that their faculty were much more pleased with the information they were getting. There was more clarity in how they were supposed to interact with the students. And the students themselves had all of these tools at their disposal, a clean, nice user interface. And so it’s really rewarding from our standpoint because we are upstream of the devices themselves. We’re a platform that’s designed for an organization or a university to help these users. And it’s what Jerit and I saw when we were at ATIA was we got to meet some of these folks, hear their stories, learn about some of their frustrations and struggles. And it was great to do that because we know that this is putting better and more efficient tools in the hands of people that can directly deliver for those folks.

Awesome, awesome guys, if our listeners want to find out more, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Yeah, if anybody’s looking for more information, Orchestrateams.com, there’s great information on our platform there. Schedule a demo, it’s probably the best way to enter your information. And we’d love to show you how the platform can work and transform your organization.

Awesome. And Mike, if our listeners want to find out more about Orchestrate as a whole and everything else, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Yeah, we have a different website that talks a little bit more about our broader service set for workflow tools. If you’re a nonprofit or an association or you just have something that could use a nice online platform to increase your efficiency and deliver your services better, it would be at onlineapplications.net. And so both of those places, you’ll be able to reach me and Jerit. We would love to connect with you, learn your story, learn about some of the challenges that you have, find ways that we can reduce those pain points, and provide you state-of-the-art user experience and top-of-the-line technology platforms.

Nice. Yeah, you make access to accessible technology more accessible, which is always a great thing for everybody on every side of that table. Well, Jerit, Mike, thank you so much for coming on today for telling us about Orchestrate AMS, and really just how it can help users, like I said, on both sides of the table, with really just getting that process started all the way through completion of just getting folks the accommodations that they need. So thank you so much.

Thanks, Josh.

Thanks, Josh.

It’s really a pleasure to be on.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or Intrac. You can find out more about Intrac at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project Easterseals Crossroads or supporting partners or this host. This was your assistive technology update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.