More than 2.4 billion people around the globe live with a health condition that would benefit from rehabilitation, and more than 1 billion are living with a mental health condition. But how do they find the right therapist among the roughly 2.8 million OTs and PTs out there, not to mention SLPs and mental health professionals?

The answer is pretty obvious: marketing.

But in our busy clinical lives, we tend to overlook the importance of this business activity. And we certainly don't spend enough time thinking about how it could drive better outcomes. We know that therapeutic alliance is one of the main drivers of therapy outcomes. Yet we rarely think of marketing as the first step in helping a patient find the therapist who is right for them.

Luckily, there's some fascinating research out there to help us think about this overlooked therapy activity.

And I'm excited to welcome to the podcast Erica Stevens, MOTR/L, CLT, CHC, CYT, owner of Thrive OT. Erica built her practice from square one, selling a niche of therapy that really made her get clear about who it's for and what the benefits are.

Financial Disclosure: OT Potential is a Jane App affiliate and receives a commission when listeners purchase Jane App with our Jane App promo code: Potential. Jane App comes up in this course because our speaker uses it to run her practice. Jane App had no role in the content of this course. This relationship is also disclosed in the episode.

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For as long as I've been an OT, I've been hearing about occupational therapy's advocacy to be recognized as behavioral health providers.

This is frankly a little confusing, since OT has deep roots in mental health care — and many of us became OTs because of the unique way the profession holistically considers mental health and physical health, and how the two intersect in everyday function.

Things honestly become even more confusing when you start to dig into what exactly it means to be recognized as a behavioral health provider. What doors does that open to us? What is the current patchwork of states — and what is our desired future?

There is no better person to help us speak to these questions than Halley Read. Halley is the lead author on "Occupational Therapy: A Potential Solution to the Behavioral Health Workforce Shortage," published in Psychiatric Services in 2024.

Which gets at exactly the right question: why are we limiting the mental health workforce, when mental health workers are so desperately needed?

This course is intended for OTs, to help us understand this situation — but also for our fellow members of the healthcare team, to understand what OT can contribute and what policy changes would let us work in our full scope.

See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/ot-as-mental-health-providers

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On one hand, it truly feels like we are on track for health technology to transform healthcare as we know it.

On the other hand, we have to weigh the reality that many health tech solutions end up abandoned.

This is especially true of consumer-facing health tech. Some of the latest research shows that around 70% of users abandon health tech apps within 100 days.

Rehabilitation technology fares better — largely because of the clinician in the loop, who prescribes, fits, and supports the technology toward a defined therapeutic goal. But abandonment is still real: even with a clinician involved, one study showed roughly 10–30% of assistive rehab technology is abandoned,. Rates run higher for some device categories, like pediatric AAC devices that show 33% abandonment.

Fortunately, new research is emerging all the time on the factors that drive technology adoption — and, increasingly, structured frameworks to guide our decisions.

In today's course, we are excited to welcome Chris Gaskins, PhD, whose dissertation, "Mental Workload during Prosthetic Training" examined how cognitive demand shapes the way clients learn and adopt health tech. We'll hear how he is thinking about this whole landscape — and, most importantly, how he makes decisions with his clients at his outpatient neuro practice.

See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/rehab-tech-abandonment

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Healthcare has many challenges right now, but so many of them stem back to one looming global reality:

By 2050, the number of people on our planet over age 65 is projected to double. It’s almost hard to wrap your head around the financial impact, the caregiving demands, and just how profoundly this shift will alter society.

Luckily, the latest systematic research is crystal clear: to truly support aging in place, we need multidomain interventions that target the physical, cognitive, and social dimensions of healthy aging.

Even better? We already have a health workforce where multidomain care is our absolute specialty: hello, OT!

Unfortunately, we don't yet have widespread, turn-key business models to deliver this type of care at scale.

Today, we’re talking with Dawn Heiderscheidt, who is pioneering a career and a business in the aging-in-place arena. We’ll learn how she leverages her specialized OT skill set, makes the financials work, and provides much-needed care to her community.

See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/ot-and-aging-in-place

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Over 53 million people in the U.S. provide unpaid caregiving services. That's a stunning 1 in 6 people.

The complex role of caregiving can entail everything from behavior management, symptom detection, and nutritional guidance to medication administration and transfer skills.

As you can imagine, insufficient caregiver training can lead to increased patient risks for safety and injury, worsening symptoms, loss of function, and higher healthcare utilization costs.

And for the caregivers themselves—unmet training needs are associated with higher anxiety, depression, burden, and lower self-esteem.

Prior to 2024, healthcare workers like OTs and PTs faced significant billing barriers because insurance required the patient to be present and actively participating during training. But in 2024, new Caregiver Training Service codes were introduced that every OT and PT needs to understand.

In this course, we'll look at these codes with dementia expert Rachel Wiley. We'll talk about what they entail, with a focus on how they can be implemented in practice. But we will also talk about their current limitations—and future directions for truly meeting the massive needs of caregivers and their patients.

See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/caregiver-training-codes

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The 2027 Physician Fee Schedule signals a continued restructuring of clinician payment-redistributing funds towards primary care and behavioral health while providing signals for what's coming next.

OTs and PTs can no longer sit on the sidelines.

As straightforward, low-complexity care increasingly moves toward digital pathways and as patients increasingly access care through digital front doors, we must advocate that CMS properly values the high-value cognitive work and in-person, complex clinical reasoning and officially integrates therapy as the missing third pillar of the primary care team.

This year's proposed rule is a critical opportunity to provide CMS solutions that can be met by OTs and PTs and advocate for key coding updates: reimbursing existing evaluation codes by complexity level and creating new non-time-based management codes to capture longitudinal care provided by occupational and physical therapists.

At OT Potential, we're equipping YOU to raise your voice. In this live webinar and course, we'll spend an hour unpacking the proposed rule, detailing our policy asks, and sharing a simple, plug-and-play comment template so you can submit your own letter to CMS. We'll be led by the incredible Dana Strauss, a doctor of physical therapy and healthcare public policy expert.

See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/medicare-advocacy-for-2027

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The latest clinical practice guideline for occupational therapy for autistic people across the lifespan urges us to shift away from deficit models toward neurodiversity-affirming, strengths-based care.

But, what does this look like in practice?

We know from the research that there are barriers at every level to delivering the type of support we aspire to- from rigid service silos to inconsistent legislation.

That’s why I’m so excited today to welcome to the podcast someone who is charting a new way forward: Samantha Valasek, OTD, OTR/L Director of OT Services, at Spectrum Psych in LA.

Samantha delivers OT services alongside psychotherapy and psychiatry to clients with autism, ADHD, anxiety, & mood concerns.

I can’t wait to hear from Samantha about what assessment, treatment, and interprofessional collaboration looks like in her day to day practice.

And most importantly: what it looks like—both as individual practitioners and as a collaborative team—to deliver care that supports our clients in ways that are truly meaningful to them.

See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/neurodiversity-affirming-ot-for-adults

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As we’ve interviewed expert clinicians on the podcast, clear trends have emerged. These clinicians have two things in common:

1. They have a pretty set arc to their treatment sessions.
2. They tend to work from “menus” of intervention options.

I’m pretty sure they do this- because this is what they’ve discovered works. But, I’ve never really seen this approach studied or discussed in research…until now.

I was honestly flabbergasted to hear one of the most prominent rehab researchers in the world, talking about these two things, in his paper Many Paths to Recovery: The Case for Treatment Pluralism. From what I understand, Dr. Cook gives these concepts some formal names: he calls those intervention menus ‘treatment pluralism‘—and he calls the components of the arc of a session ‘therapeutic ritual‘… driven by what researchers call contextual factors

In today’s episode, I can’t wait to dig deeper into this paper—and how our guest Dr. Chad Cook currently understands the factors that make therapy effective.

This is an episode that could fundamentally change how you think about each patient encounter.

See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/msk-treatment-pathways

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