Clinicians seeking reimbursement for childhood apraxia of speech should:
- Provide clear, initial information regarding apraxia of speech in children in written reports, progress notes, and informational letters to insurance companies. Be cognizant of the impact of your words-for example, use "childhood" instead of "developmental." Share information with families who are appealing denials.
- Insurance companies are interested in both treatment outcomes and efficacy. Clinicians will need to document outcomes of their interventions carefully. For a practical overview of treatment outcomes data from one facility, read "Functional Treatment Outcomes in Young Children with Motor Speech Disorders," by Thomas Campbell in Clinical Management of Motor Speech Disorders in Children, edited by Anthony Caruso and Edythe Strand. However, stopping at outcome data will not be enough. Campbell states that, "We need to move beyond outcomes data and start documenting treatment efficacy by carefully thinking through research design and experimental control questions in order to obtain interpretable clinical data to be collected and presented in a scientific way to the insurance industry." Clinicians will need to turn to researchers for these data.
- Stay current on the prevailing expert literature on the diagnosis and treatment of CAS and other severe speech production disorders. See the Apraxia-KIDS Web site, produced for The Childhood Apraxia of Speech Association by the Hendrix Foundation, as one source of comprehensive, current, and easily accessible information. The two nonprofit groups have just recently released the print proceedings of the 2002 Childhood Apraxia of Speech Research Symposium, which is available for order through the apraxia-kids.org Web site. Although research related to apraxia is relatively sparse, the past 30 years have seen constant refinement and changes in the understanding of apraxia of speech in children and there appears to be increased interest in research and its clinical applications.
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