Deciding Your Practice Model

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

You have to decide, now that COVID-19 will come to an end sometime, you have to decide how you want to continue to practice. See, before COVID-19 everybody saw their patients pretty much face-to-face, but now with COVID-19, most people are doing tele-mental health. Well, as COVID-19 winds down, you're going to decide, "Do I want to go back to face-to-face or do I want to stay with tele-mental health or do I want to do a combination of each?" I would suggest that you do this, talk to your patient, and see which way they prefer it, because there are advantages to both ways.

Now, most therapists prefer to see people face-to-face. I've noticed this as COVID-19 has developed. We don't have statistics on it because it was too new, but I would say 20 to 30% of the therapists feel that they should be seeing people online, they want to see people online. The other 80% want to see people face-to-face when the COVID-19 pandemic is over. You have to decide which you want to do, and then you have to ask the patient what they would like to have. Now, here's what's important. If they say, "Oh, I just like to stay with tele-mental health," you've got to make sure that your compliance stays the same.

In other words, if you see people live and you see them an average of 20 times, and you see people with tele-mental health and you see them an average of five times, then it's not helping them and it's not helping you. You have to give them the choice, but when you do, make sure that you check your compliance each way and see that they're equal. If they're not equal, then you got to move patients to the way where they get the most help because they have the best compliance.

This is Dave Kats. Thanks for listening