We want to take a moment to explain to you why we put the steps in our process that we do, and help make the process make sense to you.
Don’t Hesitate
First of all, we want to encourage you to go ahead and start the process if you at all suspect that your child might have some issues. More often than not parents wait way too long to begin seeking out therapy resources. We have had parents in our parent meetings in tears, asking themselves why they didn’t start the process a year ago or more. Generally speaking, our kids don’t grow out of these things. If you think you are seeing issues, it’s only going to get worse over time. The younger we can address the situation, the quicker we can resolve it. It will be easier for you, and a lot more cost-effective, if you get your child in sooner rather than later.
Schedule a Tour
So if you suspect your child might have issues, at least come in for a tour. You can come talk to use and give us some information about your child so that we can help you. We can tell you that 9 times out of 10 when a parent suspects that there might be a problem, the child ends up in treatment. Your gut-level feelings are probably accurate.
You are also welcome to go to our website to look around there, and then come visit the clinic. It’s very important for you to get a visual feel for the clinic so that you can see whether you think it will be a fit for your family and your child. You can schedule a tour on our website at any time, for any of our offices.
Insurance Benefits
If after viewing the clinic you want to start treatment, we ask you to send your benefits information in. You can even do this before your tour, which is fantastic because then we can have all of your benefits information ready for you during the tour. We want you to know exactly what this is going to cost you, so we’ll call your insurance provider and verify all that for you. If you don’t do this before the tour we can collect the information from you at the tour, and have the information ready for you in a day or so.
Our Forms Tab
After that, if you decide to move forward with the evaluation, we ask that you do the paperwork that’s on our website. It’s under the “Forms” tab. You select the office you’re in, and that paperwork automatically goes to that office. The reason we need this paperwork is that it lets us understand what issues are going on with your child, it gives us medical history, and it also gives us a lot of information about your child. This way when we go to select our assessment forms we are able to do a better job selecting them quickly, and also formulating a better idea of what we will want to do during that evaluation.
2 Forms You Need To Complete
There are two sets of forms. One set is general intake, and that’s general information. Those are also the forms that will have your benefits information. Then we have the therapy-specific forms, one for occupational and physical therapy, and one for speech therapy. If you’re going to pursue all three therapies, you’ll have to complete both of those forms. If you’re only going to speech you just have to do the speech form, and if you’re only going to do OT and PT you only have to complete that form. If you’re going to pursue speech and OT, you’ll have to complete both forms.
These forms are very important for the therapist. They use them to learn about your child’s developmental milestones, behaviors, daily schedule—a lot of different things.
Schedule The Evaluation
Once these forms are in we can go ahead and schedule the evaluation. We can schedule the evaluation with just your general intake form completed, but we will need the therapy-specific forms at least three days before your evaluation. This will give us enough time to evaluate those forms and look at the best assessment tools for your kiddo.
The testing time per discipline runs about an hour and a half to two hours. Sometimes we do it all in one day, sometimes we spread it out. It’s really based on your child, and we’ll have a good idea of what they will tolerate based on the forms we receive from you.
Parent Meeting
Once we complete all the testing we will have a parent meeting to go over all those reports. The parent meeting runs about 30 minutes. We encourage both parents to be there for the parent meeting, but we know that can’t always be the case. Sometimes dad can call in from work, and that’s fine. But we ask you to not bring your kiddo to the parent meeting because we want you to really focus on what the therapists are saying to you. Then, at the point, that treatment is recommended we will go ahead and schedule treatment.
Prescriptions
At that point, we will get a prescription from your physician. Some of our disciplines require a prescription prior to the start of treatment. We can evaluate without a prescription, but we have to have a prescription from your doctor to do treatment. If we have any issues contacting your doctor we will let you know—sometimes it requires an additional phone call from mom or dad!
How Long is the Process?
From beginning to end the process takes anywhere from 9 to 4 weeks, depending on how quickly we schedule everything. Often we do the evaluation one week and the parent meeting a week later because it takes about a week to generate the reports.
Please let us know if you have any questions, or would like to schedule a tour!
[su_button url=”https://cuttingedgepediatrictherapy.com/schedule-a-tour/” target=”blank” style=”flat” background=”#55BEB1″ size=”4″ center=”yes” radius=”0″ icon=”icon: file-pdf-o”]Schedule a Tour[/su_button]
