Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve noticed telehealth became a big deal in 2020. Every healthcare organization, system, and clinic implemented some sort of “virtual care” option for those unable to obtain in-person healthcare services during the height of the covid-19 pandemic. Now, many of these telehealth rollouts checked the box as “minimally viable”, but they lacked some important and necessary pieces to make them sustainable for the long-term. 

In fact, when I was consulting for Georgia’s Department of Behavioral Health & Developmental Disabilities, one of my projects involved developing the operational and clinical guidelines for telehealth service delivery across the statewide integrated clinical support services (a Telehealth Roadmap of sorts).

That project, coupled with my consulting work in the private sector highlighted two great struggles that many organizations face when implementing...

Hi, my name is Janet Ottersberg and I have worked as an Occupational Therapist for over 30 years. I have had the pleasure to work with clients from neonates to 104 year olds and have worked in all settings that OT’s practice. I am so grateful for this career that has allowed me to be flexible and work according to my lifestyle needs at the time. As a single parent, this flexibility allowed me to be there for my child as much as possible and still have a flourishing career. All the shifting I learned to do as a single parent afforded me the experience to create the changes necessary to continue to work, despite a global pandemic. 

As this global pandemic drags on and on, many of us in the rehabilitation field have had to make accommodations to stay afloat in the field of Occupational Therapy. Some people have left the field, some have changed their practice to a hybrid model and for many of us that shift included moving to a telehealth model of treatment. I...