My name is Stacy Levy, and I’m here today to talk with you about teletherapy. Teletherapy offers a flexible, effective way for children to receive therapy from the comfort of home. Whether as a backup option for a missed session or a regular part of your child’s care plan, virtual therapy sessions can help keep progress on track without the stress of commuting.

What Is Teletherapy?

Teletherapy may be a new term for you. You might have heard it be referred to as telemedicine or virtual sessions, but they’re all the same. What you can imagine that teletherapy looks like is that your therapist is going to be on the computer interacting with your child through some sort of virtual platform.

You Don’t Always Have to Choose Between Teletherapy or In-Person Therapy

At DTS, we do use a HIPAA-compliant platform to perform our teletherapy, and we do see it as a very effective and beneficial tool for therapy. It doesn’t have to be all teletherapy or all in-person therapy at our clinic. What we find most successful is to be very flexible with our families.

Oftentimes, the method of therapy you experience will be situation driven. Maybe the weather is kind of iffy, and instead of getting out in the weather, you would prefer to have your child participate in therapy virtually. That is a great solution as opposed to canceling your session and getting behind in your plan of care.

It also provides an opportunity for us to make up for a missed session. If you are unable to participate in therapy because your child’s sick or you’re out of town, and during the week you just don’t have the time to make it to the clinic, we can provide you an opportunity to replace that therapy session with a teletherapy option.

Teletherapy Gives the Therapist the Opportunity to Use a Child’s Natural Environment

The reason why we really like teletherapy is it is an opportunity for the therapist to see the child in his or her natural environment, and it is also an opportunity for parents to participate in therapy. You can be in the background, or you can be actively participating in the therapy right then and there.

It gives us an opportunity to provide strategies and techniques that might be more real for you, because we can see what the child’s desk is set up like, or we might see how the kitchen is set up. Wherever you are, we can provide direction and examples that are more true to the situation for your family, because we can actually see your natural environment.

We find that parents do really like the teletherapy (or telemedicine, or virtual) option for many reasons, but convenience is the main one. It really is a nice supplement to traditional in-person therapy, and we encourage you to use it as an option for mixing things up a little bit. It can give you a break from the traffic in the city and allow you to stay on track with your child’s plan of care.

A Note About Insurance and Teletherapy

But as a little caveat, if we are billing insurance, we’ll need to double check that your insurance does cover teletherapy or telemedicine sessions, because sometimes they can get a little bit funny about that. If teletherapy is something you are open to, then just let your therapist know and we can absolutely verify that benefit and move toward getting that settled.

Reach Out to Dynamic Therapy Specialists for More Information

We hope to see you on screen or in person very soon. If teletherapy is something that you want to do, contact your therapist if you’re already a DTS family. Or, if you’re interested in becoming a DTS family, then I encourage you to reach out to us by phone at (225) 767-5032.