In today’s episode, I have a great conversation about online and telepractice therapy services with the founder and CEO of BlinkSession.com, Eric DeGrove. Eric and his wife, Rikki DeGrove, CCC-SLP started a new outpatient clinic about 2 1/2 years ago, Sprout Therapy Services in Colorado Springs, CO but suddenly realized many of their patients were coming from far away. Since Eric’s background is in programming, he jumped onto the opportunity and that’s how BlinkSession was born!

In today’s episode, we discuss why Eric built Blink Session, Opportunities to Offer Services Online, The Biggest Challenges to Offering Services Online, and then Eric offers online-based Private-Practice Startup Advice for people wanting to enter the space.

In this episode:

01:45 – Value, Value + Value !!

02:58 – Home Based Treatment

05:50 – Telepractice and Billing

06:15 – Today’s topic – TeleTherapy

08:28 – About BlinkSession

13:31 – Online Speech Therapy

17:02 – Easy Solution for Teletherapy

18:38 – HIPPA Compliance and Teletherapy

20:18 – Setup, Programming and Teletherapy

25:10 – Recording Teletherapy Sessions

30:21 – Speech Therapy is improvement for Your Patients

31:00 – Added Value for Patients

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Now a lot of it goes back to what I said earlier about focusing on the results. The result of Speech Therapy is improvement, improvement of your patients life of whatever their therapy goals are. The goal is not just to do therapy. The goal is to see their lives improved and so this online tele therapy option offers that a different way to achieve the same goals.

[Commercial]

Well, Hello everyone you’re listening to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast. This is episode number 45. My name is Kyle Meades and I’m a Speech Pathologist since 1993. And these podcasts are designed to help you improve your business and your life one Podcast at a time.

Welcome back to the show everyone. Thanks again for all the emails and all the questions and as of today, today is Sunday November 25th 2018. We have well over forty one thousand seven hundred and sixty six listeners to the show and I’m super delighted you guys are out there. And if this is your first episode Welcome to the Speech Therapy Private Practice StartUp Podcast, and I hope you find everything that you need to grow, scale, start your own Speech Therapy Private Practice. I know you’re in the right place, lots of people get value here every single month and if you don’t mind you hear me say it time and time again, Value is what you get in the absence of money. These podcasts are absolutely free for you, so if you wouldn’t mind just go to the Android or iOS platform of your choice and leave some good five star feedback so that other people just like you can get the same valuable information that you’re receiving now, they can find it much simpler if you would just do your part and leave some feedback.

Also we have a space available for the perfect student that’s when you fly into Tucson and work with me hand in hand and we’ll show you how to get credentialed, how to bill and how to grow, scale, work on your referrals, all the things that you need to know. It’s a supercharged system to get you ready to go in Speech Therapy Private Practice. But a lot of people just can’t leave their job and if that’s where you are right now we have another option where you can get training from me and I’m there to help you. It’s the Private SLP All Access Community and you can find these options at privateslp.com/coaching.

Now I wanted to jump in today and answer a question. We had a listener and her name is Stacy and she was wanting to know if we are able to treat individuals in their home that have been discharged from home care or maybe they’ve maxed out their Medicare benefits. She goes on to say that she works with adults and the geriatric population, strokes and traumatic brain injuries. She’s got referrals to see these families in their home and she knows that these folks they can’t get to the outpatient clinic. But she’s more than willing to go and see these people in the home setting.

And so she wanted to know if they can pay cash and she wants to see those patients and so that’s what she wanted to know. And my big disclaimer here I’m not a lawyer. I don’t want to be a lawyer but I will say this. You want to double check and make sure that you don’t have a contract with Medicare. I mean you may want to have a contract with Medicare but I guess the main issue here is you can take someone’s cash if you’re not in network with that person’s insurance plan and you just might find out if you work for long term care centers. You may already have a Medicare contract attached to your NPI number, so you definitely want to call. If you go to cms.gov, that’s the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, you can reach out to them, give them a call and give them your name and NPI number. You may find that you are already in the Medicare system and if you are you may want to think twice about taking cash from that person because if you are a network provider from Medicare services you’ve got a bill those Medicare plans appropriately and accurately.

So it’s a contractual issue and again I’m not a lawyer but I do know that if you are in network with any plan, that could be Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealthcare, Tricare or any other plans when you are in network you’ve got to provide that service to those patients under those rules that you signed in that contract. So you might want to just do your due diligence and double check if you’re in network.

There’s nothing wrong if you’re not credentialed with any health insurance plans and you want to see people in the home. That’s fine. If you have an agreement you can do that. In the All Access Community, we talk about how to bill insurance companies if you do have those patients that you see that are in network with those plans that you’re credentialed with. We show you how to bill it and how to collect it. Also too when someone has Medicare especially with these geriatric patients they also might have other insurances like they might have Tricare for Life or they might have Blue Cross and Blue Shield. You need to build those plans first because any sort of government plan wants to be the pair of last resort. Any Medicaid plans or any Medicare plans they always want to be the pair of last resort. So there’s other plans that you need to bill appropriately first if you’re in network with those other plans. So that’s just something to think about.

And today what I want to do is I want to talk to you about teletherapy. And recently I had a gentleman named Eric DeGrove. He reached out to me. He is the president of Blink session and you can find him at Blinksession.com. He is a programmer and he is the CEO of Blink session. He reached out to me and wanted to tell me about his software platform that he has made from the ground up and it allows someone to perform teletherapy sessions, bill it, get paid and had a schedule on his platform. And it’s just really nice to see another person out there really making a change and making a difference in other people’s lives through the platform of teletherapy. His wife is a speech pathologist and they own sprout therapy services out in Colorado Springs, Colorado. So when he reached out to me he wanted to let me know that they started out as a brick and mortar business but they found that they really had another opportunity to help people that couldn’t get to their clinic for Speech Therapy services and that’s where this whole idea of blink session got started. So in the interview that we complete today we talk about why he built blink session and some opportunities to offer services online. We talk about the biggest challenges to offering services online. And then his Online Private Practice startup advice so anybody out there who has an interest in teletherapy or maybe is thinking about starting a teletherapy business or some sort of addition to your own Speech Therapy Private Practice, this is the episode for you.

Let’s get started,

Kyle: Hey Eric! How you doing today?

Eric: Doing good.

Kyle: Hey, how was your Thanksgiving?

Eric: It was really good, had a good time with family and ready to get back to work here before Christmas.

Kyle: That’s awesome. Yeah I just got off the plane, got out of Baton Rouge in New Orleans and I’ve been doing that whole vegan diet thing. But once a year I go crazy and ate too much crawfish, grow oysters and fresh seafood.

Eric: You got to dig in once in a while.

Kyle: Oh yeah. Hey, tell me about this blink session program you made. Why do you do that?

Eric: Yeah, So my wife and I we live here in Colorado Springs and she’s been a Speech Therapist for 13 years now. And my background is in software development. We founded a clinic here two and a half years ago and during the time, that we were starting up we were looking for business. We noticed that a lot of our clients were coming from further out from our location out in rural areas and we thought maybe this is a business opportunity for us. Maybe this is an opportunity to serve people who are on the outskirts of the city but do it online. And so we looked into doing Tele practice or Teletherapy and at that time this was about two years ago. So about six months after we started our practice there was really only one software package available specifically f