LinguaCare Associates, Inc. was recently featured in an article in the ASHA Leader. Below is an excerpt:
Public-Private Partnership
In West Virginia, a private provider has joined the effort to extend services to students in remote and under-served public school districts.
LinguaCare Associates, Inc., has been providing speech-language services in West Virginia public schools since 1990, and has contracts with 10 districts located within 60-70 miles of its location in Hurricane. LinguaCare recently initiated telepractice because “we get calls every year from special education directors in remote areas of West Virginia requesting services for their students, and we can’t provide them because of the travel time,” said SLP Vickie Pullins, co-owner.
Officials from the state department of education agreed to a trial telepractice program. “Because of the established pattern of quality services that our company has already provided with face-to-face treatment, officials were confident that if we launched a telepractice it would be a quality service as well,” Pullins said. “Therefore, support from educational administrators has been excellent.”
Getting Started
To initiate the project, Pullins first reviewed ASHA’s information on telepractice; researched and interviewed other SLPs already using the model; and researched available technology. She also contacted officials about Medicaid reimbursement for telepractice in the schools.
“After all that, I met with the state department of education to identify a school district that had the necessary equipment and a willingness to allow us to implement a trial project,” Pullins said, “including the provision of a paraprofessional at the remote site.”
Many districts in West Virginia already have computer hardware and software in place for long-distance learning, so LinguaCare purchased compatible equipment for its offices. Services began in late winter in a district in southern Ohio where the SLPs had extremely high caseloads and the district had been unsuccessful in recruiting additional staff.
“We do some testing of students in that county, so we already had a connection with them,” Pullins said. “We are now serving 15 middle school students with speech, language, and fluency disorders with very good success.”
A paraprofessional who is a retired curriculum specialist from that county works on-site with the students in an ancillary role, gathering materials, preparing homework received by fax, and accompanying students to and from class. “She was trained on the use of the equipment by the IT personnel in the school district,” Pullins explained. “With her educational background, she is an excellent person to be observing and evaluating our service. She provides us with feedback weekly; her input resulted in changes after only three to four weeks into the project.”
Challenges
Pullins cites technical glitches and “not being able to get my hands on the students who need help with articulatory placement” as her biggest challenges so far. “I am learning so much about the technical side of this project, but I would really like to be able to concentrate on the clinical side,” she said. She has traveled to the remote site every other week to work with students who need hands-on treatment before they can participate in telepractice—those with articulation disorders who cannot produce the target phonemes in isolation such as lateral /s/ and /r/.
These visits, however, offer additional benefits—Pullins is building rapport with teachers and administrators and working with the paraprofessional on homework distribution and treatment activities.
Looking Ahead
“Feedback has been excellent,” Pullins said. “Five weeks into the program, I called the students’ parents, and they were very positive. One parent who initially was not enthusiastic about telepractice reports that her son—who never talks about school—comes home on telepractice days telling her all about his session with the ‘lady in Charleston on the TV screen.’ Teachers and administrators have been most supportive.”
Pullins has developed an instrument for assessing the quality of services that students, parents, teachers, and administrators will complete at the conclusion of this project. The feedback “will help us improve our overall telepractice service,” she said.
About a dozen school districts have already expressed interest in the program for the 2008–2009 school year, and Pullins has connected them with the teleconferencing equipment company to investigate grants for purchasing equipment.
“We are always looking for ways to address the shortage of SLPs in West Virginia,” Pullins said, “and we are excited about the possibility of being able to provide services to children in our state who have limited or no access to speech-language treatment.”
To read the entire article, go to http://www.asha.org/about/publications/leader-online/archives/2008/080715/080715e.htm
