Original Posting 15.02.18
COMET began in 2008 as a way for Children’s Institute to support their work in schools ...
performing assessments, shifting away from paper completion and duplication of effort and moving toward electronic completion and utilizing a database to track what’s been completed and what was outstanding. As more organizations adopted the system for their own data collection purposes, an LLC for COMET was formed, solidifying the partnership between Children’s Institute, a nationally-recognized not-for-profit committed to supporting the social-emotional health of children, and SophiTEC, a custom software firm with expertise in database design.
The COMET Customer base has grown well beyond schools over the years. We branched into supporting out-of-school time programs with our COMET Operations package, focused on modules like attendance and membership management. In the last few years our work with community collaborative groups has grown and we developed the COMET Backbone approach which helps bring together data collected across multiple organizations and school districts. We continue to grow our features for this market by adding multi-organizational data mapping and an API to support data integration. But, we never forgot our roots, working with schools and other organizations that leverage COMET to track program impact, and rely on our COMET Outcomes package centered on individualized assessment and reporting. We weave the idea of ‘outcomes’ into all the work we do with our customers and partners, because that’s what it’s all about - improving outcomes for the individuals served by our programs.
What’s next for COMET? Our latest customers are using COMET to track specific services and referals for individual children, often in the human services domain. Recent customer use cases also include community data efforts where COMET is the chosen platform to bring data together across multiple organizations' programs, tracking the data for each child over time. Data management in the health domain is our newest market as we begin working with different groups who are focusing on ‘whole-child health’ – physical, cognitive, social-emotional, etc. These initiatives span all of the work we’ve done: from our roots in social-emotional assessment with schools, to screening and referral for various developmental needs. All of this focuses on making sure kids are ready for kindergarten, able to begin their journey in school to the best of their potential.
That’s a pretty quick snapshot of where we started and where we’re headed.
To learn more, check out our COMET Introduction and COMET Overview.