When working with clients remotely, we should be thinking about more than a way to manage their mental health symptoms. As a resource to the community, we should be using telehealth as a platform for prevention, enhanced wellness, chronic disease management, and an improved quality of life.
What services will you cover? In traditional face-to-face therapy, we might offer couples, individual and family therapy. Along with assessments and testing. While we'd like to continue to offer all aspects of our practice to the remote areas of the country, it is unlikely that we will be able to provide the exact same services.
What does your liability insurance say about providing services outside of the country? As you prepare for taking on board your clients, you should consider that your clients may move abroad or travel for an extended period of time. If this occurs, what happens to the therapeutic journey of the client if you are not covered by your liability insurance. You may feel this might not be important to understand until you come across it, but if you are servicing any clients who provide fly-in / fly-out services, airline pilots, or people in the military, this is a legit concern.
What aspects of therapy may be different over video conference compared to face-to-face? We have a few clients who are adamant that they can't provide telehealth services because they like to be able to assess the client's body language while in the session. They also feel that they (the practitioner) is able to build rapport better when the client is in the room. How can you plan for the difference in telehealth sessions and the impact it may have on the client's therapeutic journey?
What are the integration barriers you may have? Will you need to establish a workflow process for payments? Do you understand if there are different Medicare Codes that you need to use for billing? What happens when the internet goes down? What if the client can't connect on the other end?
Contingency plans, trial and error, and updating your established procedures will need to be used until you feel confident that you're providing an excellent clinical service.
