Social Media and HIPAA Compliance: Protecting Your Practice in the Digital Age

TBHI’s training programs are designed for beginning and intermediate-level “telepractitioners” and “telesupervisors” wishing to deliver telebehavioral health services in these disciplines:

• Addictions Specialists / Telehealth
• Counseling / Distance Counseling
• Nurse Practice / Telemedicine
• Nursing / Tele-Nursing
• Occupational Therapy / Tele-Occupational Therapy
• Physicians / Telemedicine
• Physician’s Assistants / Telemedicine
• Psychiatry / Telepsychiatry
• Psychology / Telepsychology
• Social Work / Telehealth
• Speech and Language Therapy / Tele-Speech and Language Therapy
• Therapy / Online Therapy
• Other Tele-Therapies, including but not limited to these groups of practitioners:
  • Internists, Pediatricians, Osteopaths, Gerontologists, Physical Therapists, Dietitians, Behavior Analysts, CEOs, COOs, Administrators, Billing & Coding Staff

The Telehealth Micro Certification Level I Training package is best for you if you work in a hospital, clinic or agency setting that is already telehealth-organized to legally and ethically deliver telebehavioral /telemental health. This training will provide you with an exciting look at legal, ethical and clinical guidance about how to get started and deliver direct care via telephone and videoconferencing. This training package is for you if your organization has dealt with the difficult legal, ethical policy issues, and you just want to understand basic legal and ethical requirements as a practitioner working under the policies developed by knowledgeable oversite staff members. It includes several extensive check-lists that will help you get and stay organized. This program provides you with a TBHI Basic Telehealth Micro Certification that will distinguish you as a telebehavioral professional.

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The Telehealth Micro Certification Level II Training package is best for you if you need to develop a telepractice and need help thinking through the issues and their relevance to your setting. It is designed to help you understand, develop and implement many of the policy challenges and decisions that are involved in the set up as well as the day-to-day practice of legal and ethical telehealth. It will systematically help you develop the many competencies required for telepractice. More specifically, it will:

• Explain fundamental terms, concepts and their definitions
• Help you choose your technology and its specialized features for video conferencing, email, text messaging and other technologies
• Practice legally and ethically over state lines and international borders
• Educate your client/patient about how to be safe when working with you online
• Understand HIPAA, your state laws and those of other states you wish to serve
• Help you establish appropriate screening protocols for carefully selecting appropriate clients/patients
• Give you an understanding of how to develop appropriate clinical protocols to adapt to specialized treatment (EMDR? DBT? Mindfulness?)
• Organize your documentation in ways that are manageable and in compliance with state and federal law as well as other oversight groups (e.g., Joint Commission, URAC, CARF)
• Develop and implement your emergency plans, build them into your informed consent processes and have clinically appropriate relationships to confidently handle emergencies and crises
• Set up your virtual office and desktop to follow current telepractice guidelines
• Get paid for your services, including Medicare and Medicaid as well as 3rd party carrier reimbursement.
• Develop your own templates for informed consent, intake, progress, termination, risk management notes to have reviewed by your attorney (Sample templates provided in level II training)
• How to interview and select an appropriate attorney for your telepractice
• Guide you to finding and contracting with a malpractice carrier to manage risk

After completing this training, you will be well on your way to feeling both competent and confident about handling a wide variety of challenging situations in The Level II Certificate package training program then is designed for the hospital, clinic, agency, or group administrator or program director. It is optimal for a small group or an individual practitioner who is responsible for program design and implementation. It provides a true roadmap for how to get started with technical, clinical, legal and ethical policy decisions as well as practical program implementation. Numerous case examples, checklists, sample documents and much more are available for you to maximize your time and effort. This program provides you with a Certificate that will distinguish you as an Advanced Telehealth Professional.

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The All-AccessPass package is best for you if you need to develop a legally-compliant telepractice quickly. It gives you an extra 6-months to take advantage of all the courses available to the Advanced Micro Certification Training Learners PLUS many of TBHI’s most popular webinar training topics available to you for a full 12 months from your date of registration. You will also have access to TBHI’s newest course, which involves 6 hours of in vivo skill-building in a live group format. This culminating course is designed to help you practice your skills as a live clinician in a protected small group setting.

Includes 12 Hours of Group Consultation

The package is then completed with 12-monthly group consultations to help you integrate many pivotal foundational terms and concepts so as to be able to apply them when facing unprecedented challenges as you embrace technology to increase your reach, access more clients/patients, improve their outcomes, lower your costs and increase your profits — all from the comfort of your own home or office. This All-Access Pass training package will give you step-by-step instructions for the implementation of evidence-based protocols, pitfalls to avoid, checklists and templates to use and provide you with a solid familiarity with the many trusted informational sources discovered by TBHI over the last 26 years.

TBHI’s professional training is offered both 100% online and in-person. TBHI’s online eLearning, multi-media environment allows you to easily gain a comfortable, working knowledge of the evidence-based competencies for best practices for physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants, psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, counselors, and behavioral analysts who wish to work in telepsychiatry, telepsych, telepsychology, teletherapy, distance counseling or online counseling, digital health, electronic health, etherapy, online therapy, telespeech therapy, tele-occupational therapy and other healthcare professionals who are licensed.

• Enjoy an exciting, 24/7, convenient online access to courses anytime and anywhere with an Internet connection
• All courses are self-paced, professionally developed and competency-based, with summaries, checklists and clear “to-dos”
• Courses are offered in written form (text) with video and audio segments for illustration
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• All training included in the Basic Micro Certification package is included in the Advanced Micro Certification package
• You are invited to take the training modules in any order you deem appropriate
• Up to 62 hours of training, (with only 36 required to qualify for your TBHI Advanced Telehealth Microcertification)

TBHI’s online coursework gives you access 24/7. You will receive a rich, multimedia platform to enhance your enjoyment and learning retention.

• Most of the training is written, following optimal instructional design principles of text-based information with links to primary and secondary source documents, interspersed with images, audio, and video segments to punctuate an important point.
• All video segments follow the American Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements for being available with captions or a transcript.
• To help improve learning comprehension and retention, “Essential Points” in the form of bullet points are provided at the top of many pages, to help you initially grasp the important issues, and give you clues as to which specific topics are considered important enough to re-address in the post-tests.
• The training is also annotated with footnotes to give you the inside story on a number of important issues.
• Courses are self-paced, meaning that you can stop and start it at your convenience.
• A PDF format is available for all core courses if you’d like to carry them with you to read as you move about your world.
• TBHI training is self-directed, in that it contains a number of high-quality links to primary source documents throughout the Internet that we’ve assembled for your convenience and to maximize your learning.
• The training content has been highly edited by more than 100 reviewers who are professionals in the field, so you can trust that it is accurate, well written and easy-to-comprehend.
• TBHI’s professional training has received many accolades from colleagues, who appreciate our optimized instructional design format as well as the richness of content and superior customer support. To see these comments, look at this testimonial page.
• You will be able to print your own Micro Certification from our website.

Time Investment & Post-Tests

Completing the TBHI training will require approximately the same number of CME or CE hours offered with each course. A 6-hour course then will take about 6 hours to complete, depending on how quickly you read. A one-hour course typically involves approximately 10,000 words, minus the words involved with presenting audio and video segments. The course evaluation and post-test will require that you come back into the website to respond to a series of questions. Post-test need to be passed with a grade of 80% or better to get the course completion certificate. (You will have learned a lot, and passing should be no problem. Of more than 8,600 trainees that have come through our doors, only three needed help with post-tests.)

Schedule

TBHI “classes” have no specific start and stop time. All online training is self-paced, accessible 24/7 through your web browser. You are free to train anytime, from anywhere. If your client/patient doesn’t show for their appointment, you can easily engage with your materials online, or in printed form.  Printed training materials are available upon request in PDF format to conveniently travel with you on a plane, train, bus or simply as you lounge in your living room. If you wish to complete all your training in a weekend, a week, a month or over several months – the choice is yours.

Special TBHI Conveniences

Checklists and summaries can be copied and printed. Video/audio segments require an active Internet connection. Course evaluations and post-tests must be completed online. All registrations have an access period of at least 6 months from the date of purchase, except for All Access Pass users, who are given a full 12-month access period. Your Course Completion Certificate is printable from your own computer, and available as soon as you complete your course evaluation and post-test online. TBHI Is pre-approved to offer CME and CE hours for physicians, physician’s assistants, nurses, nurse practitioners, psychologists, counselors, marriage and family therapists, social workers and many other fields. (See CME and CE approval question listed below.)

If you’d prefer in-person training, please write to us to request a calendar for TBHI’s live events. If you’d like to invite a TBHI speaker, please submit a speaking request here. 

All TBHI courses include CME or CE Hours (See Continuing Education or Continuing Medical Education section below).

• All Learners must pass all post-tests at a rate of 80% or higher. The post-test(s) can be taken as often as needed within the paid access period.
• Print your Course Completion Certificate immediately at your desktop for your licensing board
• Contact us for a check of your program completion, and we will send you your TBHI Telehealth Micro Certification to proudly display in your office

The following CME/CE approval entities have approved CME or CE Hours for TBHI training.

• The New Jersey Association of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons (NJAOPS)
• American Psychological Association (APA)
• Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB)
• New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work (NYSWB)
• NAADAC, the Association for Addiction Professionals (NAADAC)
• National Board of Certified Counselors (NBCC)

See Continuing Medical Education or Continuing Education information below.

Earn your certificate as a Board Certified Telehealth Professional Level II *. This designation** is increasingly used to recognize our graduates for having completed the most comprehensive and research-based post-graduate training program available anywhere today.
*Certification Mark Pending
**Fees for this credential are included in the fee for your TBHI training. Testing for the credential is accomplished by passing each course’s post-test with a grade of 80% or higher. Post-tests can be taken as many times as needed within the paid access period. Extended access periods are available with a modest fee. This credential is valid for 3 years and requires annual renewal for a fee of $40 per year. Annual renewal requires an additional 3 hours of training from the Telebehavioral Health Institute. Once credentialed, your name and credentials (Level I or Level II) will be made available through a trademarked search engine, and you will be eligible to have your name and profile added to TBHI’s Professional Directory at no additional cost for 1 year.

Absolutely! Start with reviewing the list of TBHI’s specialized training programs listed here and write to us for pricing.  Please note that Micro Certifications require all the specific courses as listed.

Refunds are available for any course within 30 days of purchase if you are dissatisfied for any reason. However, there will be a $25 refund fee. Please give us the opportunity to remedy any disappointments by writing to us first. Our contact desk is available from Monday to Friday during business hours. If you would like a phone call rather than an email response, please provide times that you’ll be available and where you can be reached, (a telephone number and direct line including extension if any).

Yes, please allow us up to 15 business days to process your refund. Do not send repeated emails.

TBHI is aware of the immediate need for quick answers by professionals who are setting up their systems with short timelines. To respond to the increasingly frequent demand for quick answers to many questions, TBHI has developed the following two options, with or without the purchase of TBHI training. (Please note, that TBHI consultants will not attempt to give you 41 hours of training in this 2-hour time block. Rather, the focus of this session is to give you many quick answers and when appropriate, guidance toward where to find optimal resources to help you find the detailed answers that you need, including TBHI’s specialized digital training programs.)

TBHI FAST TRACK GROUP CONSULTATION – provides a 2-hour, video-conferenced group consultation session to quickly answer your most burning questions about which technology to purchase; how to set up your documents; how to legally practice over state lines and international borders; client/patient screening, and billing practices. Fast track group fees are $250.

TBHI FAST TRACK PRIVATE CONSULTATION – provides 2-hour, video-conferenced, private consultation to quickly describe your unique setting and the populations that you serve, then answer your most burning questions about any telehealth topic. Fast track fees are $500 for the two-hour package (discounted from $550 for regular individual consultation)

TBHI training is exclusively digital for the purposes of this application. our website is written in Arial font to facilitate reading with appropriate alt tags for those who prefer or cannot see images. Audio and video recordings are produced with captions for deaf and hard of hearing trainees. PDF’s of all training are available for individuals who prefer to print and read training offline. Accommodations have successfully been developed for individual trainees with more specialized needs.

Add any training item to your cart. Near the end of the checkout process, select PayPal as your payment option. (PayPal will allow you to use your preferred currency in most cases. If you need assistance with currency equivalence or discounted rates for international training, please contact us.)

If you have questions about which TBHI consultation and/or training is right for you, please contact us.