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April 16, 2023

Stuttering Therapy with ChatGPT

As a graduate course instructor gearing up to teach my first course in the ChatGPT era, I’ve wondered how students, novice clinicians, and clinical generalists (those without expertise with a specific clinical population) might rely on generative AI to fill in knowledge gaps and generate ideas for therapy. Speech-language pathology has an enormous scope of practice with constantly updating research, making it practically impossible for an average clinician to keep up with best practices in any one area. And if you do try to dive in to refresh your knowledge, it’s difficult to find your footing in a sea of information. 

If we start relying on tools like ChatGPT to filter through the noise and bubble up the key ideas, will this facilitate more evidence-based practice? Or will we be at risk of continuing the old mistakes, if that’s the bulk of the Internet’s text-based corpus?

With just a few weeks until class starts, I decided to test this out myself!

This post covers:

- The importance of prompts quality and asking the right questions
- Treatment planning prompts examples and responses
- Evaluation of ChatGPT output
- How to ensure evidence-based practice while using AI
- Implications for clinical educators

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February 9, 2022

How to Get Insurance Coverage for Private Pay Services

It is increasingly common that small specialty medical and therapy practices are “private pay only”. This can be frustrating and disheartening if you can’t afford the full cost of private pay services, but the only professionals who specialize in your needs don’t take your insurance.

Good news: even when a practice is “private pay only”, services are typically eligible for insurance coverage. This works a little differently than “in-network” services. It can require a little more paperwork on your part as the patient, but it can be well worth it to ensure you’re able to access treatment with a provider who is a good fit for you.

This post will review how “out-of-network” insurance coverage works, and how to go about getting payment from your insurance company for specialty services.

In this post:

  • What do "private pay only" and "out-of-network" mean?
  • How are claims submitted?
  • Is out-of-network coverage the same as in-network coverage?
  • What does "allowed amount" mean?
  • Summary: how to get out-of-network/private pay services reimbursed by insurance
  • Additional resources, including free downloadable guides for calling your insurance
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July 11, 2019

What is Cluttering?

what is cluttering

Cluttering is one of the main speech disorders we treat here at Speech IRL. This communication challenge is also one of the most overlooked. Below, we've provided some information and treatment recommendations for those who clutter.

The “other” fluency disorder

One of the most famous fluency disorders is stuttering.  A "fluency disorder" is best described as a disorder which impacts the flow and rate of speech. Cluttering is also a fluency disorder and it affects how a person's speech is perceived by listeners.

What is cluttering?

A 2011 study by St. Louis and Schulte define cluttering as a perceived rapid and/or irregular speech rate, which results in breakdowns in speech clarity and/or fluency.

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May 22, 2019

Rapport: the key to successful stuttering treatment

Stuttering treatment is a mystery. Traditional interventions that prioritize fluency drills and speech strategies often fail to generalize. We are left wondering, why isn’t the client making progress?

Maybe we're looking in all the wrong places.

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March 5, 2019

Mindful Communication

By: Rachel Muldoon

The concept of "mindfulness" has been buzzing around lately. What does it really mean and what does it have to do with communication?

Let's tackle some FAQ's.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness means being present. That can be, present to your thoughts, present to physical sensations, taste, touch, sight, sound, smell, or present to your feelings. What you can notice in a single moment is boundless, but often our minds draw us in to a limited portion of the experience.

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