Tool fit
The BAA closes this question. The data model would have anyway.
This gets searched a lot and the honest answer is short: clinics do not run these tools, because they cannot. It stops at procurement, before anyone gets as far as comparing features. The rest of this page is about why you would not want to even if it did not.
The short answer, once, so it is out of the way.
You cannot put protected health information into a tool without a business associate agreement covering it, and these tools are built for schools and childcare rather than healthcare. Brightwheel states that it does not certify HIPAA compliance. ClassDojo describes itself as complying with COPPA and FERPA, and Bloomz with FERPA and COPPA, which are the frameworks of education records.
So in practice this is not a shortlist a clinic gets to have. That matches what I see: clinics are not quietly running ClassDojo or Brightwheel, they are stuck without anything because the obvious tools are not available to them. The interesting question is what to look for instead, which is the rest of this page.
Suppose the paperwork were not a problem.
It is worth going through this, because it is the same test to apply to any tool that does sign a BAA. None of it is a criticism of those products. They are good at describing a room full of children going through a shared day. That is simply not the shape of an ABA caseload, and there are four places it shows.
The unit is a class. Yours is a child in a session.
A classroom tool is organized around a group that moves through the day together: circle time, snack, outside. An ABA day is a stack of individual sessions, each one a named child with a named technician for a set block. Those are not the same shape, and the group is the wrong container for everything you want to record.
The actor is one teacher. Yours is three technicians and a BCBA.
A class has a teacher for the day. A child in your clinic may pass through morning coverage, a lunch relief, an afternoon technician and a supervising BCBA. Attribution matters, because the useful question is not just what happened but who saw it.
The day is a shared routine. Yours is a schedule that changes at 7am.
Daycare runs the same routine every day for everyone. Your schedule gets rewritten when someone calls out, sessions run long, and a child gets moved to a different room with a different person. A tool that assumes a stable routine has nowhere to put that.
The audience is every parent in the class. Yours is one family.
Broadcast is a feature in a classroom and a hazard in a clinic. Every update you send belongs to exactly one family, and nothing a parent sees may reference another child, in any form.
What the model has to be instead.
Work backwards from the two moments that actually matter in a clinic day. One is the handoff, when a child changes hands and everything the last technician learned has to travel with them. The other is pick-up, when a parent asks how the day went. Both are about a single child, over a bounded stretch of time, seen by a specific person.
So the record has to be per child and per session, attributed to whoever logged it. Get that right and the handoff and the parent summary both fall out of the same data. Get it wrong and you are maintaining two accounts of the same afternoon.
A record per child, per session
Not per day, and not per room.
The technician on every entry
So the handoff and the audit trail are the same record.
Transitions as first-class events
What preceded it, how long recovery took, what worked.
Strict per-family scoping
A parent can reach their own child and nothing else.
Logging fast enough for a session
Tapping, not typing, or it does not get done at all.
A signed BAA
Before a single child’s name is loaded.
Built around the session, not the room.
In Cliqit, staff tap a child, tap what happened, and pick the detail from a list. Every entry carries the child, the technician and the time. Parents only ever reach their own child.
Those same entries do the two jobs above without being written twice: they keep the shift handoff current during the day, and they assemble the end-of-day summary for parents at pick-up.
Questions clinics ask about this.
Can an ABA clinic use ClassDojo or Brightwheel for parent communication?
In practice, no. Putting protected health information into a tool requires a business associate agreement covering it, and these products are built for schools and childcare rather than healthcare: Brightwheel states it does not certify HIPAA compliance, and ClassDojo and Bloomz describe their compliance in FERPA and COPPA terms. The question usually closes there, before anyone compares features.
So why does this keep getting searched?
Because the need is real and the obvious tools are not available. A clinic owner knows daycares solved parent updates years ago, goes looking for the equivalent, and finds that none of it can hold clinical information. That is the actual situation, and it is worth knowing what to look for instead rather than concluding nothing exists.
Is Brightwheel HIPAA compliant?
Brightwheel states that it does not certify HIPAA compliance. That is the vendor’s own position on it, and it is the answer to check with any tool built for childcare or schools rather than healthcare.
What about ClassDojo and Bloomz?
Both are built for schools and describe their compliance in education terms: ClassDojo complies with COPPA and FERPA, and Bloomz complies with FERPA and COPPA. FERPA governs education records, which tells you what kind of institution the product was designed around.
What is the practical difference for a technician on the floor?
In a classroom tool, the natural action is posting an update about the room. In an ABA tool, it is logging an event against one child in one session, attributed to you. The second one is what the next technician and the parent both need, and it is also what makes the end-of-day summary possible without rewriting anything.
Do we need to drop our practice management system to fix this?
No. Cliqit is not an EHR or a practice management system and it never touches a claim. Keep CentralReach, Rethink, Motivity, Theralytics or whatever you run, and use Cliqit for parent and team communication alongside it.
We already run a group text with parents. Is that better or worse?
Worse in one specific way: a group text mixes families in one thread, and it lives on personal phones, so the record leaves when the technician does. A per-child log keeps each family separate and keeps the history with the practice.
Show us what you are using now.
Fifteen minutes. If what you have works for your caseload, we will tell you to keep it.