Group Practice Tech Podcast

A podcast where we help mental health group practice owners ethically and effectively leverage tech to improve their practices.

Frequency and Topics

Group Practice Tech will drop episodes about weekly — 4 times per month, to be exact.

Episodes will be everywhere from 5 minutes to an hour, depending on what we’re talking about. We let the topic set the length.

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Your Co-Hosts

Liath Dalton is PCT’s director and a co-owner. Liath is especially passionate about helping therapists be resourced and supported in navigating the security compliance process and identifying the solutions and processes that meet the particular needs of their practices. Liath’s consultation area of expertise is focused on selecting the right combination of services and tech that not only meet the legal-ethical needs of mental health practices, but also the functionality, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness needs as well.

Evan Dumas works in the space between mental health therapy and tech support, and is a senior consultant at PCT. His aim is to help workers everywhere cope with the occupational hazards of burnout and compassion fatigue by normalizing that terrible feeling of overwhelm when things go wrong.

With a background in IT, Evan has spent time as the Oregon Counseling Association’s tech chair after PCT’s late founder Roy, while getting his MA in Professional Mental Health Counseling from Lewis and Clark. When he wasn’t helping counselors adapt to technology, he has given talks and workshops on burnout and compassion fatigue all around Oregon.

we discuss the recent Change Healthcare cyber attack and its impact for group practices.

We cover what we know and what we don’t know yet; resources to help you take practical steps; how many people are impacted by this breach; the ongoing investigations; ransomware attacks; who is liable for this incident; maintaining operational continuity; and the importance of being proactive in your security practices.

we summarize what group practice owners should know about the Office of Civil Rights Annual Reports to Congress and explain how understanding them can inform risk management.

We discuss the compliance report from the Office of Civil Rights (OCR); how complaints filed were resolved; compliance reviews vs. audits; reframing the (very common) fear of HIPAA complaints; the unsecured PHI report from the OCR; risk management for avoiding large breaches; the importance of reporting breaches; and the primary sources of breaches and ways to minimize them.

we’re exploring what group practice owners should know about cross-jurisdictional practice in the age of teletherapy.

We discuss the shifting landscape of cross-jurisdictional practice; different licensure compacts to be aware of; applying for privileges to practice under licensure compacts; telehealth training requirements; service and payment parity; payment parity advocacy; states that restrict teletherapy based on provider location; temporary practice provisions; and our CE training that dives deeper into this topic.

we’re covering the fundamentals of texting in group practice.

We discuss HIPAA compliance as a process, not a product; secure and non-secure text messaging; client requested alternative communications; how to use SMS texting in a compliance compatible way; what to have in place with your phone service provider; what to do about personal phone services; phone service providers we recommend (and don’t recommend) for teams; and how to document text messages.

v1.24.10-beta

Scheduled Maintenance

We will be temporarily taking the website offline at 10:00 PM Pacific (1:00 AM Eastern) tonight, July 6, in order to make some improvements. We plan to be back online by midnight Pacific (3:00 AM Eastern). We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Dismiss