Displaying items by tag: Interview

How necessary is professional liability insurance? What if I own my own business? If there is a breach of client data, am I covered? 

To answer these questions and more, we asked for help from CPH and Associates, a professional liability insurance agency specialized in the mental health field since 2001. Below, CPH shares some common questions they hear from their insureds in relation to malpractice insurance and telehealth specifically.

Therapists occasionally receive requests from prospective clients looking for faith-based or spiritually integrated counseling. Good therapists might know that they are sensitive to a client’s faith and that they can help them, yet they will often refer the client to a therapist who provides a specific faith-informed therapy. There are two good reasons to do this. First, it is important to provide the client with the best fit for what they are seeking. Second, spiritually integrated therapy truly is a specialization requiring a particular set of competencies and supervised experience.  

However, finding a fitting therapist for the client can often be a significant challenge. Conducting a search for a local one, whom the referring therapist has vetted, may yield little to no results. When well-trained spiritually integrated providers offer teletherapy, this can overcome the search obstacle. Many faith-informed therapists have not begun to provide teletherapy; the thought of launching a telehealth program can feel overwhelming for any provider. Some faith-informed therapists and organizations have successfully faced this task by partnering with people who provide the proper training and support.

Some phone systems market themselves especially for healthcare organizations, and for good reason. Not all phone systems are the same. One error that clinicians (and therefore clinical practices) often commit is to take the technology they use in their personal lives and bring it into their healthcare practice,  assuming that it is adequate. Traditional phone lines and cellular service is quite secure. However, additional features such as voicemail, faxing, and texting bring added risks to healthcare information. Group practices and larger larger organizations utilize features such as setting on-call procedures, ring groups, automated attendants, and administrator control over all phone accounts. Clients put their trust in their healthcare providers to protect their private information. Using ordinary or traditional phone lines, voicemail, faxing, and texting can jeopardize patients’ sensitive information.

In this video our CEO, Raymond Barrett, interviews Michelle Inauen LPC MFT who provides counseling by both video and phone.  Michelle Inauen shares how she got started in distance counseling, the services she offers to individuals, couples and families.  Michelle also provides some advice to other clinicians looking to get started in providing virtual counseling. 

Finding the right therapist for yourself or someone else can be challenging for anyone.  However, finding a psychotherapist for someone who is living abroad can be even more difficult.  To help provide some guidance with this task, our CEO, Raymond Barrett, interviewed Josh Sandoz, LMHC, who is curator of the International Therapist Directory.

The use of mobile devices and mobile apps have become the norm. Mobile apps solve people's need for purchases, information, connection, health and nutrition tracking, and mental health. Deciding which mobile app to use for a specific mental health need, such as managing depression, can be difficult. There are thousands of apps to choose from and the information available on the apps’ sales pages are often not adequate to make an informed decision.

Clinicians need to be competent at reviewing apps before recommending them to clients. Individuals seeking to utilize apps also need guidance in making a smart decision. Professional organizations have carefully created guidelines for evaluating apps for mental health. For example Raymond Barrett, our CEO, as a member of the American Telemedicine Association has been on an ATA task force for establishing tool for evaluating mobile apps for depression.

This week Raymond Barrett, CEO of Telehealth Certification Institute, had the opportunity to interview Lisa Wozniak, a professional marketing consultant and the founder/owner of Woz Marketing, which according to their website (wozmarketing.com) is “a social media marketing company dedicated to serving the needs of small business owners and medical professionals.” The full video of their conversation can be found below.

Ruby Blow, owner and operator of Atlanta-based Development Counts, provides clinical supervision, consultation, and training. Among her many licenses and certifications, Ruby is an Approved Clinical Supervisor (ACS). She has provided services since 2001 and increasingly, Ruby has seen a shift in the mode of services to electronic meetings (primarily via video conferencing) rather than in-person.

In this interview with Dr. Douglas Weiss, Ph.D., we discuss the impact that using technology has had with clients, the importance of being appropriately trained when providing treatment for sex addiction, and the way his specialty practice works in conjunction with other counselors who provide care for other conditions such as anxiety or depression.

Steven Levenkron, M.S., one of our alumni, is a ground breaking and well-known psychotherapist  specializing in anorexia, self-mutilation, OCD and sexual abuse. He is the author of both fiction and non-fiction books which provide theoretical analyses in his areas of expertise. In a career that began in 1970,  Levenkron has provided over sixty-thousand hours (and counting) of therapy, and boasts a 90% recovery rate for his patients.

Ray Barrett of Telehealth Certification Institute, LLC recently sat with Steven Levenkron to discuss his years of experience and the success he has experienced when using technology in his treatment of patients.  Levenkron has found that abuse victims are more open when care is provided at a distance. When those clients find themselves alone and in a secure environment and at no physical risk from others, they tend to open more quickly and disclose to the provider - hence, care and treatment begin much faster. For abuse victims, non-verbal communication (such as email) is the most effective for opening up, followed by audio (telephone), and video conferencing. The least effective style of meetings for this clientele is same-location sessions.