Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you. With COVID-19 and all of the things that happened, a lot of people have moved to telehealth. When you move to telehealth, you want to have a HIPAA compliant package or platform that you use. People continually ask us, "What are the best HIPAA compliant platforms for therapists?"

Well, here is what I would suggest. If you have a software that has a telehealth platform that is HIPAA compliant, I would use that because it's usually cheapest and it's already attached to your software. If you don't have a software like that, then these are the ones that we see as being fairly good software. I won't put these in any particular order, but I have one at the end that I want to tell you about that I think is interesting.

You can do Skype for Business, you can do Microsoft Teams, you can do Upbox, VSee, which is the letter V and then S-E-E. You can do Zoom for Healthcare, you can do Doxy.me, you can do Google G-Suite...

This time of the year is a good time to think about converting to either all cash or more cash in your practice. You see, here's what usually happens. People start out in the profession and then they go into private practice then say, "Well, I'm not on any insurance panel so I got to be cash. They have cash and I usually charge a little price." Then after a while, they say, "Wow, I'm turning a lot of people away because I don't have insurance." So, they join a bunch of insurance panels.

Then after a while, they say, "Well, people that are cash practitioners are making a lot more than I am. I'm getting paid an average of $70 a session. They're getting paid an average of $120 a session. I should go more toward cash." Eventually, you have a lot of people go to all cash or mostly cash. I want to talk to you about how to do that. First of all, I would suggest that you look at your low payers. Any EAPs that are low payers, any insurance companies that are low payers and decide which ones...

Every time we come to about April 14 or so, we really say, I should have been saving more for taxes. Now, I don't know if you're like that but it seems like so many times we get caught. Here's what I suggest you do. Why don't you save for taxes on a regular basis? I hear people say, well, I wanted to save for taxes but I waited until the end of the quarter and I didn't have any money then.

That isn't how you save for taxes. You take a little bit out of every deposit or you take a little bit out every week and if you would take just 10% out of every deposit, I'm sure that you had plenty of money at the end of the quarter to pay your taxes. Here's just a plan. Set up just a separate account that just says Tax Account and then every time you make a deposit, put 10% in that tax account. You'll never miss it at the time. You'll have your taxes all in line when it comes time to pay taxes on a quarterly or at the end of the year, a quarterly basis, or at the end of the year. This is Dave...

Hi, this is Dave Kats for Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you. One of the best things you can do this time of the year is have a strategic planning session. Now, you may say, well, I can't have a strategic planning session, I don't have much staff, or I don't have any staff at all. That shouldn't stop you. You should gather people that are important to you, that you think can help you make good decisions.

You should gather them all around the table and you should sit for at least a half a day and possibly a whole day planning the rest of your year, planning what you're going to do for as far as getting new patients, as far as retaining patients, as far as increasing revenue centers, as far as increasing collections, maybe raising prices, lowering overhead. There's a myriad of things that you can talk about.

Here's what we do. About once every nine months, we have a strategic planning session. Maybe invite your spouse or your significant other if you don't have staff. If...

Hi, this is David Kats, Therapist Consultants. I have a tip for you.

Eventually, the COVID-19 pandemic is going to be over. You have a decision to make. Are you going to go back to face to face patient counseling or are you going to stay online or are you going to do a combination of both? What's right for you may not be right for the next therapist, so I want to point out some advantages and disadvantages of going face to face versus going virtual.

First thing I want to talk to you about and tell you that, some therapist actually like going virtual better. Not many of them, but about 20% of the people that we talked to say they would like to stay just doing tele-mental health, as opposed to going back to one on one. That's one thing to think about. The next thing you have to think about is that, it is actually cheaper in most cases to stay with tele-mental health because you may not have a building to rent. You may not have utilities. You may not have a separate phone system. You...

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

Right now with COVID-19, most of us are doing tele-mental health, but there's something we have to be careful of. You see, the privacy factor with tele-mental health isn't quite as good as privacy factor when you see people face to face. Here's what I think you should do, I think you should create a 10-second statement that you read or recite at the beginning of every session, and it just says, "We want to inform you that the privacy issues with tele-mental health are not quite as good as its privacy issues if we're face to face," or something like that.

That will cover you in case there's any unintended, it won't totally cover you but it'll help you if you have any unintended results from tele-mental health. I would say that at the beginning of every therapy session, I would just repeat it very quickly, and then I would also make a note in my notes that I read that privacy statement to them. I...

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...

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

They say behind every black cloud is a silver lining. COVID-19 was a black cloud, where is its silver lining? There are several silver linings. First of all, when you were just doing therapy in your office, you could only advertise and market and accept people within about 10 miles of your office. Now there are a few people that would drive 50 and 100 miles but very few. Most people were right around your office.

Now that you're doing tele-mental health, the truth is you can talk, advertise and market and accept anybody in the state or any state you're licensed in and so that's a real advantage. Here's the disadvantage in the advantage. A lot of our therapists said, "Now that I'm doing tele-mental health, I'm going to advertise over the whole state, let's say the whole state of Florida, as opposed to just Orlando." They spent $500 to advertise in Orlando, COVID happened, they went online, they did $500...

Hi, this is Dave Kats, therapist consultants and I have a tip for you.

The last few weeks, we've been talking about how to build your practice, we said there's only four major ways, get more new patients, see more patient visits, provide more services, or do a good a better job in collections. Today, I want to talk about the last one doing a better job in collections. Every month, if you're especially if you're an insurance practitioner, but even if you're a cash practitioner, you should go to your software and run aging of accounts. Now, an aging of accounts is simply a report that tells you who owes you money, and how long they have owed that money to you.

If you look at that, and then you have only two or three decisions you can make, you can either resubmit it to the insurance company if you file insurance, or you can write it off, or you can send the patient the remainder of the bill, but you can't let time go on too long before you run an aging of accounts. I got a funny...

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

The last three weeks, we've been talking about how to build your practice. We said there's only four ways, get more new patients, see more patient visits, provide more services, or do a better job in collections, and today, I want to talk about services. You can really increase your services by doing these two things. Number one, do assessments on people. When your patients come in, if you took a written instrument, and did an assessment on them, and charge them just as little as $125 that they would pay themselves in most cases, the test itself, the instrument itself probably only cost you $25, so you'd have $100 profit.

Now, if you see 10 new patients, that means you're going to have $1,000 extra profit every month, just because you're doing assessments, and they help the patients and they help them therapists tremendously. The first place I would look is in doing better or more assessments. The second...