Related service providers: do you bill dishonestly?

seeker

Wed, Jun 28 2017, 1:08 am

amother wrote:

This is very confusing. If you have to see each 2-3/week child 5/week, that limits your caseload tremendously. If every therapist is doing this, the school is hiring and paying about 3x as many therapists as they are being reimbursed for services.

How can this work out fiscally for a school?? I'm not trying to make accusations, but I'm a school based therapist too, and schools and programs are struggling right now, closing left and right. Where is this money coming from?

In this kind of setup generally the schools are not hiring and paying; they are allowing the therapists to work within their school as an independent contractor and the therapist bills the DOE directly. So it's the therapist who is losing out if they see kids they aren't able to bill for, and they are probably willing to do it because it's the best chance they have to get a full caseload in one building, which is gold.

I am not aware of any illegality in doing this. I read my contracts very thoroughly. It may be unethical but not illegal. It would be one thing if the school were controlling the cases but the parents have the legal right to get whatever provider they want. The school is entitled to control who goes in and out of their building and offices. Their main interest, IME, is to have it as convenient as possible - which is why they may insist that certain kids be grouped or that sessions take place for certain amounts of time on certain days of the week. They can't have a kid being pulled out of a certain class twice a week and stay in the class twice a week because that makes it nearly impossible for the child to keep up, the classroom teacher has to try to juggle kids with holes in their lessons, and you have a management situation with different kids going in different directions at different times. So in trying to make things work out for everyone - the parents who want their kids to get services in school, the teachers who want help managing their special needs kids, the provider who wants a guaranteed bunch of students in one place, and the principal/coordinator who has a school to run, it usually falls on the provider to figure out how to make it work with everyone's mandates and his/her billing system.