Telepractice Today

Recorded during the 2021 Thanksgiving holiday weekend, hosts Kim Allen and Todd Houston share new tips for use in teletherapy as well as some of the latest news impacting the delivery of telepractice service delivery.

Tasha Perkins Holmes, MOT, OTR/L, BCP has provided occupational therapy services in a variety of occupational health settings with patients in age groups spanning from toddlers to the elderly. She spent a decade providing school-based OT services to students both on-site and as a teletherapist.  Currently, Tasha is a Clinical Quality & Resource Manager at PresenceLearning.

Barbara Fernandes, founder and CEO of Smarty Ears, is well known for her innovative and breakthrough product development, which translates science into user friendly and powerful technology to support individuals with communication disorders. Barbara transformed an entire industry to adopt mobile technologies through the design and development of over 60 mobile applications and an entire communication symbol library. As the founder of Smarty Symbols, Barbara also created the most inclusive and comprehensive symbol library and developed a powerful new technology that is disrupting the special education field by providing a platform for custom visual support creation. Most recently, Barbara has been awarded a small business innovation research grant by the National Institute of Health, and she released a ground-breaking technology called the Speech and Language Academy.

Kristin Martinez received her M.A. in Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and has been a speech-language pathologist for over 20 years. Kristin provided speech-language services to children in her local school district and in private practice before starting as a teletherapist with PresenceLearning in 2013. Kristin has supported teletherapy services for hundreds of school districts and has presented on the topic of teletherapy nationwide, and currently serves as the Clinical Director for PresenceLearning.

Sarah Wu is a speech-language pathologist based in the Chicago suburbs with over 15 years of experience. She speaks Spanish and has worked primarily with bilingual students in school settings, in particular teletherapy. Ms. Wu works part-time as a clinical supervisor for Lewis University in their newly launched Center for Interdisciplinary Telepractice (CIT) and also part-time for TeleTeachers, a staffing company, as the training coordinator. She also runs Bilingual Speech Therapy Resources, LLC, which is her business focused on speech therapy materials in English and Spanish, which can be found at speechisbeautiful.com. She received her B.A. in Spanish and business from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, and her M.A. in communication disorders from Northwestern University in 2006. In June 2022, Sarah will complete an educational specialist degree (Ed.S) in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis in ESL/Bilingual Education from National-Louis University. 

Dena Stephenson is a physical therapist and Director of Therapy Services at Ogden Regional Medical Center in Ogden, Utah.  She has been a physical therapist for 19 years and has worked in acute care hospitals, charter schools, outpatient clinics, home health and skilled nursing facilities.  Dena loves treating patients and focuses all her management responsibilities on improving patient care by supporting the therapists on her team.  She recently oversaw the use of on-site teletherapy to preserve personal protective equipment and provide valuable speech therapy services to patients with Covid-19 and dysphagia.  Dena only treats a few patients a week in her director role but she loves to help family and friends improve their movement patterns and decrease pain, by teaching them integrative movement techniques in-person and often through teletherapy. 

Emily McCullough is the owner of Parade Pediatric Speech Therapy, an online speech therapy practice that supports children and teens to communicate authentically. Emily is passionate about providing affirming care via telepractice using a strengths-based, client- and family-centered model. She is bilingual in English and Spanish and has been a pediatric SLP for more than 11 years. Her practice serves children and teens anywhere in the states of Texas and Illinois.

I am a bilingually certified Speech-Language Pathologist in New York. I am the first person in my family to be born in America and to have graduated from college. Greek was my first language and I did not speak English until I was 3 years old. I work with students and clients of all ages. My youngest client was 1 year old and my oldest client was 65 years old. Currently, my main focus is speech-language evaluations and assistive technology evaluations, speech-language therapy, and feeding therapy for picky eaters and problem feeders. Outside of work, I love to travel, go fishing, try new food, dance, swim, read, spend time with family and friends, and try adrenaline-pumping activities. You can find me on Instagram @legenderi.slp and contact me via e-mail at [email protected].

Judy P. Walker is a Professor and Coordinator of the University of Maine Speech Therapy Telepractice Program. Dr. Walker has extensive clinical experience working in medical centers, rehabilitation hospitals, and long-term health care facilities. Her academic and research interests include: speech therapy telepractice, neurolinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. Dr. Walker established the University of Maine Speech Therapy Telepractice Program whose mission encompasses graduate student telepractice clinical training while providing speech therapy telepractice services to children and adults throughout Maine and at an international school in Fiji. She provides clinical supervision to graduate students in the speech therapy telepractice practicum and teaches graduate courses in traumatic brain injury, aphasia, right hemisphere damage and dementia. Her research focuses on improving the quality of life of people with aphasia and their caregivers through participation in synchronous telepractice groups. She consults with numerous academic programs and agencies who are interested in starting a telepractice program. Dr. Walker has also been invited to write book chapters and give presentations on topics related to the speech therapy telepractice service delivery model.

MaryBeth Richards assists in the telepractice program with supervision and training of the graduate student clinicians. MaryBeth has experience working in the infant, preschool, and school-age populations as well as in the acute care and home health settings. MaryBeth is currently the Maine representative to the American Speech Hearing Association’s Speech Language Pathology Advisory Council.