Health Plans Integrate Virtual Speech Therapy to Improve Access to Care
There are many compelling reasons for numerous health plans, both commercial and Medicare Advantage, to now offer and cover a well-designed virtual speech therapy solution in their benefits packages. Here are a few of the leading components that account for increased adoption among managed care organizations:
- Health plans want to enhance opportunities for member engagement, and virtual speech therapy is an ideal solution for expanding the scope of benefits and services available to both adults and children. Programs that offer hybrid care plans with synchronous live 1:1 with a therapist and asynchronous access to a practice portal help members extend the value of their live sessions and attain their speech goals sooner.
- Payers are focused on resolving Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), and virtual speech therapy helps to overcome challenges associated with transportation, patient education, social/community context, economic stability and schools with gaps in education that don’t address a specialized need like speech therapy for kids with Autism, articulation or stuttering. They recognize the value of virtual care and want to make it easier for members to access speech therapy services – avoiding travel to a brick-and-mortar facility, long wait times for appointments and time spent in a clinician waiting room. Convenient access to care in the privacy of one’s own home promotes member satisfaction with benefits and health plan member retention.
- Virtual speech therapy programs offer both national and regional reach. This is important to payers who seek solutions that scale across large geographic areas or plans that serve specified regions. It’s also important that the solution is designed to serve children, adults and seniors enrolled in commercial plans as well Medicare or Medicare Advantage.
- Addressing personalized needs is a critical component of benefit design. With an optimized virtual speech therapy program, physicians can order individualized speech therapy and take advantage of an AI-matching service that pairs each member with a speech therapist that offers the most appropriate subspecialty, training and experience for a member’s needs. This AI tech-enabled capability is exclusively offered by Great Speech.
Growing Number of Health Plans Contract with Great Speech
For all the reasons described above, Great Speech has attained contracts with some of the highest profile health plans in the United States. Below is a partial list that continues to expand on a monthly basis:
- Cigna Commercial
- Cigna Medicare Advantage
- Optum / UHC Florida
- NAMM / Optum California
- Molina Georgia
- Geisinger
- Centivo
- BCBSIL Medicare and commercial
- Zenith American
- Healthcare Highways
- Healthnet, a Centene company
Coming Soon: Humana Medicare FL, Molina Medicare & Commercial FL, Devoted
Medicare FL, CarePlus Medicare FL, Avmed Medicare FL, MMM of Florida Medicare FL.
Additionally, we partner with companies such as:
- DialCare
- Sesame
- Competitive Health, Inc.
- Careington
A Permanent Change for Healthcare
While use of virtual and telemedicine services peaked during the pandemic, utilization remains higher than in previous years. This is likely a permanent change to the healthcare delivery model as research shows telemedicine and virtual care are effective and efficient means for receiving healthcare.
As health plans seek a virtual speech therapy solution, they will be encouraged to adopt a solution soon given the nod from Congress on the extension of telehealth flexibilities.
The time is now for creating a plan and goals for improvement.
Get started with virtual speech therapy by scheduling your free introductory call today!