How To Build Clientele In Your Private Practice By Using Telehealth and Email

A quick video I’ve made that will hopefully be helpful for you if you’re a counselor (and to your clients as well):

The email that I’ve sent to my clients, feel free to use any parts of it if you need:

Hello,

With the state of affairs in the world right now, I want to make sure that I am doing my part to keep my clients safe. As of Monday, March 16th as a precautionary measure to help contain the COVID-19 virus in Colorado, I am switching to online video calls. Phone calls will be an option for my individual clients, though video calls are preferable. The situation will be re-evaluated when more information becomes available.

If you’re seeing me for couples therapy, because of the complex nature of the process, we’ll be meeting via video calls only.

To reassure you, I have been doing therapy and coaching via video calls with clients all over the world for years and as a client myself, and it is an incredible and flexible medium, and I’m glad that we have it available today as a flexible and confidential platform to meet during this time of changes. As we’re all advised to be isolated, it’s important that you know that I’m here, and beyond the change in the medium, I’m still here for you.

We would continue to address the same goals and engage in the same activities as we have been and our scheduled session time would remain the same. I’m more than happy to answer any questions you may have. Let me know what your thoughts are on this. My apologies for any inconvenience!

Logistics: I’ll be sending a separate email with a link to a video call. Before our session, make sure that you are in a quiet place without interruptions or distractions for the duration of our session. It might be helpful to ask the people around you to not disturb you for the duration of that time.

It would be helpful to use a laptop / ipad with a screen that is large enough for us to see each other, and volume that is loud enough for us to hear each other. Make sure that you fit in the frame and you’re not backlit (there is no light source right behind you).

Once again, I’m more than happy to answer any questions you may have.

Building Clientele Using Online Teleheath for Counselors

Hi, everyone. I wanted to do this quick video for counselors and a little bit for coaches as well, in terms of how do we actually work with clients during this time.

While, of course, it’s your personal decision in terms of what you do, I want to talk about the option of going to switching to video calls, both the technical stuff and how do you communicate about it with your clients. And I’ll just use my personal example. If you want to switch or at least offer this option to your clients how do you actually do it, HIPAA compliance, technical stuff, and the communication.

So first of all, what I did is sending this email to my clients on Friday. I’ll copy paste the email about going online. If you want to use parts of it as an inspiration you can do so. So I’ll let you read it on your own in the post.

Main things, when and what is happening, switching March 16th as a precaution, my personal responsibilities and all of that for social distancing.

Reassurance, we’ll work on the same goals, same activities and providing some logistics in terms of what they should expect and, of course, feel free to reach out with any questions.

So I’ve sent that to I think maybe 30 people on Friday. So far my responses have been … I didn’t get actually any response except one client for couple’s therapy, that person asked to do a shorter session. I’m doing two hours or an hour and a half sessions for couples, and then they decided to leave the same time. I honestly, I was scared, a huge cancellation, and all of that. That didn’t happen yet.

Personally I’m willing to pay that price in maybe having a few cancellations. But I’m doing what I can to keep myself and others safe since I am a hub for many people meeting me and vice versa.

So I checked … I’ve been doing Zoom video calls with coaching clients for years and phone calls as well. Now with therapy clients, of course, it’s important to keep the HIPAA compliance.

So two main options that I know of – the Zoom video call, they give you the official plan for 200 bucks a month. Personally I feel that a bit too much.

Now Simple Practice I’ve been using it for years and they have the Telehealth video calls option in there as part of those services, including 30 days test for just adding 10 bucks a month. Now even if you don’t use Simple Practice and you sign up for it, they charge I think 49 for the most basic profile and you add 10 bucks on top of it, 60 bucks a month, that’s 1/4 of what Zoom wants to charge. So it feels like a no-brainer for me in that regard.

In terms of technology, if you already have Simple Practice or you just want to add it for the first time you go to the administration, subscription information and add Telehealth here. I already enabled it. I created an appointment, a regular appointment for myself which looks like this.

Now if I want to make it … Let me just refresh. So if you add a Telehealth you will see that you have location after you added the Telehealth option. You choose the video office, you see the start video session, and you have the share link button which actually will send me a reminder with the link.

Real quick, just make sure after you changed it to a video session, just click the button done to make sure that it changes to a video call, and then you send a share link, send one reminder. And the email that I’ll receive since I’m sending it to myself just as a demo, video appointment reminder, they can add it to their calendar and the appointment link – join video call.

By the way, this is how it looks on your end when you start the video session. You can click your … add your button in Simple Practice, join video call, and it will wait for your clients to join as well. And by the way, you can share screen with them if you need to as well.

I hope that has been helpful.