children in Ireland are overdue for an assessment of need.

Ten years ago, when I first started noticing the issue, the backlog was at 4,000. This year, it has exceeded 20,000.

This is a significant and worsening crisis for thousands of families.

What having a backlog actually costs

Take a child whose parents apply for an assessment of need when she is four. She starts school and will likely go through three school years (and in some cases, five) before she can receive the assistance she needs.

Those are the years a child learns to read, learns to make friends and navigate life.

Rather than being able to thrive, she will likely struggle in an environment not suitable for her. By the time she arrives in first class, she may identify as not intelligent enough, not able to focus or not able to fit in, when it was because her environment was not suitable for her during these important years.

None of those years are recoverable. She does not get her Junior, Senior Infants or First Class years back.

That is the milder version. For a child who needs more support, the assessment is not about seating plans and accommodations. It’s about getting a place in a special class, or a special school, or any school at all. It’s about not allowing a child to experience trauma and years of hardship because the current system could not figure out their needs in time.

What I’ve Been Working On

Every year, I see more coverage of this problem, but I mistakenly always assume it will get solved considering how significant an issue this is and how much news coverage it gets:

Earlier this year, I read yet another article on how the problem is still getting worse and I finally concluded this isn’t going to improve; and therefore I decided to dedicate my time to building a solution that can help. If you ever see how difficult it is for a family to raise a neurodiverse child without support, you would immediately understand how important it is to solve this issue.

I got in contact with clinicians to figure out where the bottleneck lies and could it be fixed.

I learned many things, including what is most important for clinicians when building something that can help them. The most important things they required was that the quality of assessment is maintained and that data protection is airtight.

I found that paperwork and following up on things such as school reports can be the most time consuming aspects of completing an autism assessment, which can take up to 10 hours per assessment.

There has been incredible advancements in healthcare innovation to make autism care professionals more efficient over the last few years, such as Heidi Health and Nabla which allows clinicians to transcribe interviews without having to manually take notes.

However these tools don’t specifically focus on autism and neurodiversity.

So I decided to build Seneca. A tool for autism clinicians to shorten the documentation load, while maintaining clinical standards.

Using Seneca, a clinician can use their notes, patient interview, and reports to draft an assessment report personalised to the patient.

Instead of starting an assessment report from scratch or with a blank template, the clinician starts with a draft report in which they can fully edit and apply their clinical judgement to create the final assessment report. This can save up to 75% of the total report writing time for the clinician.

Seneca does not shorten the assessment work itself, does not make a diagnosis, and does not decide anything. It drafts the assessment report from what the clinician captured, and the clinician then edits and applies their clinical judgement to produce the final assessment report.

If you have any questions regarding Seneca, feel free to reach out to me. I would love to learn more about how I can better serve clinicians in this space.

Daniel O’LoughlinFounder, Senecahello@senecadocs.com