This text-based course is a transcript of the webinar, “Don’t Just Do It…Get Reimbursed! Justify Your Dementia Services,” presented by Megan L. Malone, M.A., CCC-SLP, and Jennifer Loehr, M.A., CCC-SLP.
>> Megan Malone: Today’s topic means a lot to both Jenny and I. So many of us are doing great things with the dementia population on our caseloads, but we are not necessarily capturing it in our documentation. It is important that we take credit for all the work that we do. Some of the things that just come naturally to us are skilled and should be captured in our documentation. We want to share with you some ways to polish up your documentation to get credit for the work you are doing and to justify having persons with dementia on your caseload, as well as caregiver training. We hope to answer some of your questions related to documentation and reimbursement with this population.
How many of you are currently working with persons with dementia on caseload? How many of you are working in a hospital environment? How about long term care?
>> Jenny Loehr: This presentation will be appropriate for individuals who work in all settings. I would like to start with the disclosure statement. Megan and I have a book, “Here’s How to Treat Dementia,” which is published by Plural Publishing. Some of the information that is in this presentation comes from that book.
Our objectives are that by the end of the course, the participants will be able to describe the necessary components for services provided to the dementia population and describe the necessary components for documentation of speech pathology services provided to the dementia population.
Introduction
Statement of the Problem
Our documentation as speech language pathologists is not completely or thoroughly capturing what we are doing with our patients with dementia. We do a wonderful job and we make great strides towards our goals. It sounds trite and has been overused, but you have heard, “If it is not documented, it did not happen.” This trend of unsubstantiated documentation is leading to increased denials of claims and audits, and can result in employers discouraging speech language pathologists from treating this population, resulting in dementia patients/families being underserved and shrinking our caseloads. I am sure some of you have already seen that happen. I think people are afraid. I think there has been a lot of chatter out there about audits. People are gun-shy when it comes to working with the dementia population because they are afraid of the audits. Megan and I do not want documentation to prevent you from doing the wonderful things that you do with this population. That is one of the reasons that we put together this presentation.
