FAMILY COMMUNICATION RE: SHIFT SCHEDULING

08.02.2017

        1. Shift Scheduling for insurance/home services (not including school clients and adult services)

How this works:

All clients’ therapy will be provided within the three-shift time frame. The amount of shifts offered to your child will be given based on clinical recommendation and can change based on need as medically necessary goals evolve. At this time, we have received information about your child’s school program and/or other therapies and your clinician has made sure to request the shifts that work best for your child. Below is the three-shift hours outline. Your child’s shift may span all of the hours of the shift or part of the shift, depending on your clinician’s recommendation and consultation with you. Therapy cannot start before the designated start time and cannot end after the designated start time. This is to ensure that our staff have enough time to travel from one client to the next. We recognize that this may be different than previous schedules and we apologize if it causes an inconvenience. While we recognize that previously therapy may have also filled a childcare need for your family, ABA treatment is not childcare and we have to make sure that we are respectful of those boundaries.

We have been receiving lots of mailings from the BACB (Behavior Analyst Certification Board) regarding insurance work establishing that Behavioral Instructor/Registered Behavior Technician hours are not being used and/or billed for a childcare need (e.g., driving clients to and from school, or appointments). Transportation is only legitimately billable when there is an assessed ‘unsafe rider’ challenge resulting in direct and documented treatment. It also causes significant stress for our staff to be solely responsible for a client’s transportation or childcare need. For example, if a staff gets stuck in traffic or has to stay with their previous client longer than anticipated, they may run late and not be there for a child’s pickup or bus arrival.

Shift 1

Hours 8:00 am-11:30 am

Shift 2

Hours 12:00 pm-2:30 pm

Shift 3

3:15 pm-6:00 pm

• Please note that we are unable to serve a client more than 10 hours a day, no matter what funding sources are in place, due to staffing patterns and systems. If you need additional support outside of our service time, we will work with you to find care (e.g., PCA, childcare), or funding when possible. Our staff can support with caregiver training when appropriate.

2. Parent /Caregiver Training (for private insurance/Medicaid services only)

Our own client data and well established research data underscore our responsibility to provide formalized and consistent Parent/Caregiver training as a part of an ABA program. Such training consistently results in increased and better generalized skill acquisition for clients. In addition, data taken from our own insurance-funded therapy programs reveal that this training is most often an underutilized service. Due to this underuse of Parent/Caregiver training, others may make the assumption that we are not working on transferring clients’ new skills to caregivers, or generalizing skills to others in the home/community.

By October, each clinician will be required to submit a Parent/Caregiver Training Plan to their Clinical Supervisor. This will outline how the parent and/or caregiver and the clinician will proceed with training and goal setting. Every training plan will have a data component that will be reported to the relevant insurance company every 6-months during the re-authorization process. Please note that we recognize that not all parents/caregivers can participate in training to the same extent for a variety of reasons, and it may be that the training plan involves skills being transferred to others who provide care for the client.