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Hey folks, welcome [00:01:00] back to the podcast. I’m glad to be here with you as always. As always, I’m glad to have my guest today. I am talking with Diana Heldfond, who is the Founder and CEO of Parallel Learning, a technology-forward education company.
I’m also joined by Dr. Jordan Wright, Parallel’s Chief Clinical Officer, as well as the Director of the PhD Program in Combined Clinical and Counseling Psychology at New York University. You may not recognize Diana’s name, but I’m sure you recognize Jordan’s name as he has been on the podcast several times before and is generally everywhere in the assessment world.
This is an interesting episode. I wanted to talk to Diana and Jordan, who I met independently, but I was thrilled to hear that they were working together a while back. I wanted to talk with them about Parallel because Parallel is a fascinating company that’s pushing the envelope with telehealth assessment and [00:02:00] access for a number of school districts around the country.
So we talk about the origins of Parallel and how it’s serving a crucial need for these districts, we talk about the current state of the research on tele-assessment, how Parallel is leveraging technology in assessment, which is fascinating; I think that many of you will take a lot away from that section of the conversation, and what it’s like to be a Parallel provider for those of you who may be interested in going down that path.
As always, there’s a lot of good material here and I had a great time chatting with Jordan and Diana about Parallel. So without further ado, let’s jump to that conversation.
Diana, Jordan, welcome to the podcast.
[00:03:00] Dr. Jordan: Thanks for having us.Diana: Thanks for having us.
Dr. Sharp: Glad to have you. Jordan, you’re a frequent guest. It’s been a little while, and this is your fourth time, maybe and Diana, it’s been a while since we chatted so it’s good to reconnect with you and have both of you here at the same time. I’m excited to talk about Parallel and what you’ll have going on over there. Thanks again for being here.
I’ll have y’all start just to orient the audience a little bit to your voices, do a brief introduction, tell us what you do there at Parallel and we’ll go from there. Diana, you want to go first?
Diana: Yeah, I’m happy to start. First off, thank you for having us. I was saying to Jordan earlier today, before I had ever fully started Parallel and dug in, I remember watching a video of you guys chatting on your podcast. So it feels very exciting to have that come full circle and to now be on the [00:04:00] podcast together.
I am Diana. I am CEO and Founder here at Parallel. I started the company about 4 years ago, very much driven from my own experience. I grew up with learning and thinking challenges. So I fall into the population of students we now work with here at Parallel and lucky to work with folks like Jordan. I’ll let him do his introduction.
Dr. Jordan: Thanks. I’m Jordan Wright. I am going to pre-apologize to your audience because they’re probably sick of me by now. I am the Chief Clinical Officer here at Parallel. I oversee all the clinical programming. I’m an assessment psychologist. That is how I identify and work a lot in this space. I write a lot in this space.
Also similar to Diana’s story but a little bit divergent is I was diagnosed with ADHD but very late. I wasn’t diagnosed until college. And [00:05:00] so my drive for working with neurodivergent kids and providing better access and better resources for kids is to help them have more of a Diana experience where she was identified much earlier and got all the supports she needed and then succeeded in life.
I struggled for a lot longer than I probably needed to, and that’s why I was excited to join Diana on this this little experiment, this little venture that we have going at Parallel.
Dr. Sharp: It’s amazing […] from experiences.
Diana: Not so little anymore.
Dr. Jordan: It’s a big experiment now.
Dr. Sharp: It seems like it’s gotten pretty big. That’s a good way to put it. There’s a lot going on here that I’m excited to chat about. Yes.
So that’s a good segue, let’s talk a little bit about Parallel for any folks out there who may not know what parallel [00:06:00] is. I’d love to start there; tell us a little bit of the origin story and what y’all do, how it’s relevant to assessment.
Diana: I’ll start and then let Jordan fill in the blanks, but I can definitely touch on the origin story. As I mentioned and as Jordan mentioned as well is that I was lucky enough to be diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, not lucky to be diagnosed, but lucky to be diagnosed in the sense that I was 7 years old when I was diagnosed.
So I had the best-case scenario since I reaped the benefits of early detection, early intervention for those conditions, had access to a ton of resources. My parents were very on top of getting me support and care, teachers as well who were involved and had what is considered gold quality of care and recognizing that that is not the norm for most students across the United States who might be years [00:07:00] behind in core academic subjects before anyone intervenes on their behalf.
I was super motivated to rethink how we could literally recreate my own experience, my own story for more students and help get this personalized care for students when they need it most, and that means intervening early, it means different care for different students and so that was how Parallel came to be.
My background is very much on the business finance side of things, which is why I teamed up with Jordan and the rest of our team has been built around bringing minds together from all different walks of life to make sure that we are building the best possible program for students of all different needs and backgrounds.
A little bit more concretely what that looks like; we work exclusively in K-12 school districts at this point, a little bit of the county cooperative level so on as well, but always working within a public school systems and [00:08:00] helping support students through a host of different special education resources.
So everything right now from assessment all the way through to behavioral mental health coaching, we’re also doing specialized teaching, specialized instructions, a small group intervention for students who might need a little bit of extra support when it comes to reading, writing, Math so on, and then speech and language therapy, so both assessments and ongoing therapy for students.
So we’re touching all different walks of what is the bubble of special education but with the goal of making it much easier for school districts to meet students where they’re at and ensuring that kids get access to not just the resources they need, but super high quality care, no matter where they’re located in the United States.
Jordan, I’m sure you have a lot of other things to add, so I’ll pass it to you.
Dr. Jordan: Yeah. I’ve talked on the podcast before about my background with tele-assessment. The [00:09:00] reason that I started researching tele-assessment was because of access. I was driving 3.5 hours to Upstate New York to assess a kid who didn’t have access to a psychologist or school psychologist, to do an evaluation, and then doing the evaluation and driving back. And in that amount of time, I could have done 3 evaluations.
So I decided to jump into the research side and think about what is valid, what is ethical and do some more systematic research to decide, especially for performance-based testing, our IQ tests, our academic achievement tests, those sorts of areas, what is valid and what is ethical. And from there, I published some research that no one cared about until 2020, when it became very sexy for some reason.
Dr. Sharp: It’s weird.
Dr. Jordan: Something happened in 2020.
Dr. Sharp: Coincidental, I’m sure.
Dr. Jordan: Exactly. And then there was the scramble. And with Susie [00:10:00] Raiford, we wrote the book on tele-assessment; Essentials of Psychological Tele-Assessment.
Our company is entirely virtual. We’re entirely remote. We are partnering with schools and school districts to upstaff them, to upskill them, to make sure that they have better resources to meet the needs of all those kids whose needs are going unmet.
I know we’re probably preaching to the choir with your audience here, but so many schools are out of compliance. So many schools are not able to tackle the evaluations, the support services that are required of them through IDEA, through the IEP Plans and need better and more resources. And that is our goal.
Our goal is to push in and provide those resources. Licensing is a bit tough at state by state, we’re working to try, within the states we’re working in to be able to dispatch the [00:11:00] best possible providers to match with those kids who need them.
I told Diana from the beginning, I was a terrible hire and she shouldn’t hire me. I’m going to eat into our margins and all that kind of stuff from a business side, because we’re also trying to do it well. We’re trying to maintain the good quality and do all of the work in alignment with the research that I’ve done and other colleagues have done and make sure that it’s not the Wild West that was out there during the lockdowns of the pandemic where everyone was doing the best they could do, but it was not necessarily in alignment with what the research shows is valid and ethical. We are trying to maintain that quality in all the work that we’re dispatching to these schools and school districts.
Dr. Sharp: I think it’s super cool. When I saw that you were involved with Parallel and knowing what I knew just from talking to you, Diana, a few years ago, it was a really nice moment. I was like, [00:12:00] okay, this is going to be amazing. It’s a cool partnership.
I’m curious, before we dig into the state of tele-assessment, I definitely want to talk about that and where we’re at now, but just from a business perspective, I’m curious how much of this was driven by COVID in a sense, especially I think a lot of us heard schools got completely overwhelmed and that delay in being able to assess and provide services during the pandemic set the calendar completely crazy for a lot of schools and ended up with this avalanche of assessment. Do y’all have a sense of what role that played in being able to build a business like this?
Diana: Undoubtedly a large role. As Jordan pointed out, to be fair, his research was very well-known before but it did [00:13:00] spiral to fame after COVID. I would say that COVID was a big moment for education world, because it forced schools to look at other options to problems that probably existed or did exist prior COVID.
If you look at special education world, not just school psychology, but all of these different providers, it’s hard to do exactly what the purpose of special education is, which is to provide very personalized learning, which is why those services are also aggregated at the district level instead of the school site level.
When you think about a rural district in U.S., one school site might be 50 miles from the next and that provider, just as Jordan mentioned himself, doing at one point is going to be spending more time driving than actually seeing students.
In each school site, you’re going to have a handful of students who need totally different things. So they’ll actually run a system, COVID aside, to provide the [00:14:00] students with exactly what they need. It’s just a really tall aspect.
And so I think that COVID was a good turning point in the sense that it allowed districts to start looking at the different options. Teletherapy has been around far before COVID. It’s not like this all of a sudden happened during COVID that people started putting these things online, but it did make schools more receptive.
On the flip side, psychologists themselves and other providers are more willing to at least try to put things online, try to deliver services and look at that as actual long-term solution instead of a stopgap solution. I would have felt like the credentials that are needed of a special education teacher, a school psychologist, and so on is so vastly different than a regular teacher in the district in the first place that there’s always been super high turnover, huge access problems when it comes to special education as a whole that we’re only further exacerbated during COVID.
We very clearly [00:15:00] saw districts during COVID who had all of a sudden waitlists of thousands of students who needed evaluations. We still see districts who are trying to make their way through compliance issues that they’re are dealing with after COVID.
I would say COVID is a huge turning point, a huge catalyst for us diving in to this business at this exact point in time but that isn’t to say that the problems didn’t exist pre-2020.
Dr. Jordan: I would double down on that. It’s not like every school was compliant before COVID and now magically, no one’s compliant. We all know that they were just as out of compliance back then as they are now. I think of COVID as almost like a proof of concept.
I know early on during the lockdown, people were doing this as the best possible stand-in but it ended up [00:16:00] showing schools, school districts and providers, psychologists, SLPs and others that this can work just as well, if not better in certain circumstances than traditional in-person services. So that proof of concept wasn’t there before.
I think COVID gave us a PR push to think about teleservices even though, as Diana mentioned, the literature was there and pretty strong, especially for teletherapies and virtual education. It wasn’t as strong for tele-assessment. That came in the few years right before the pandemic and then that research became very hard to do during the pandemic because we had no control groups. We couldn’t compare it to assessment as usual.
Now, both psychologists and schools are understanding that this is not just a good enough fill in [00:17:00] until we can get in-person services, this is a viable alternative that could improve the ability to tailor services to exactly what kids need in the moment.
Dr. Sharp: Sure.
Diana: Maybe to add one point to that as well and to go back to the original question, Jeremy, I think COVID was a really good instigator for starting a business that has a large software component, which is what Parallel does.
I will highlight Jordan’s work as not just our chief clinical officer, but operates like a chief product officer as well in many ways, because as he pointed out already, this world is the Wild West or certainly was during COVID. Everyone was trying to figure out how to do assessments on Zoom in the best most effective manner.
There’s a lot of room to Jordan to make these services not just on par with, but in some cases better than what students are going to get in an [00:18:00] in-person setting. Especially, more and more new generation of students are digitally native students, so in many cases, for them to work through teletherapy, putting assessment aside for a second, there are ways to engage students in a virtual setting that, at this point, it’s probably better suited to the way that they ingest information and develop skills than they would in an in-person setting.
So it was a great opportunity for us to dig and think about what are the ways to, not just do this according to the research and by the book, per se, especially on the assessment side. Also, how do we think about further engaging these students using the results from the assessment to think about what is it specifically that this student needs and what can the district specifically do and how can we equip the other teachers that are supporting a student to provide exactly what that student needs.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. I’m excited to get into all these [00:19:00] components. There’s a lot going on there. When we were thinking about how to structure this conversation, you thought about this idea of, you call it 3 buckets or 3 main areas that we might touch on; tele-assessment, the partnerships with the schools and then what you’re calling tech enablement, which all sound fascinating.
Maybe we start with tele-assessment because, we’ll see, I was about to say that’s the broadest, most applicable topic for everyone out there, but that may not be true, the tech part might be interesting too for everyone.
Let’s start with a tele-assessment. I admittedly in our practice has not done a ton of tele-assessment since the pandemic but a lot of people are. I am talking about this like at least weekly with folks in consulting and podcasting and stuff. I’m curious, what is the state of tele-assessment research at this point? [00:20:00] We can take that into the practical components as well.
Dr. Jordan: It’s a great question. I can nerd out about it forever so I’m going to try and keep it succinct to spare Diana, especially.
The state of tele-assessment research has not grown or shifted all that significantly since we published the book in 2021. There is not a lot of brand-new research coming out, and the research that does come out is pretty much confirming what we already knew. So it’s reaffirming and confirming what is valid, what is not valid; what is doable, what is not doable.
We all know that we’re not going to be able to do an ADOS completely remotely, bubbles through Zoom look different than bubbles in-person, and playing with a little money is tough on online. So the ADOS as it currently [00:21:00] stands, it’s just not going to be doable. That doesn’t mean we can’t use a whole host of other measures, methods we know.
I worked with some colleagues who are much smarter than I am 2 years ago to publish a paper called Evidence-Based Clinical Psychological Assessment in Professional Psychology Research and practice. I’m very proud of this paper because what it does is it shows the current state of evidence when it comes to assessment and it reminds us not to put too much stock in any one test, measure or method.
The best evidence practice is to triangulate across different methods, across different informants, and make sure that you’re understanding the limitations of everything we’re doing. Every test that we care about in psychology, I lump into 1 of 3 buckets. They are either looking at abilities like our academic achievement tests, our executive functioning tests, our [00:22:00] IQ tests.
They’re looking at traits. The way I define traits are the way you interact with the world that is relatively stable across context and across time. And these are our personality measures. Our MPMIs, our NEOs, especially, these sorts of personality things.
And then it’s looking at functioning. The 3rd bucket is functioning and that’s, how are you doing socially? How are you doing symptom-wise? What are your coping mechanism strengths? What’s happening for you right now?
Everything we look at is a proxy. I can’t put you on a scale and tell you how narcissistic you are or take your blood and tell you your verbal ability. Everything is a proxy. Everything has error. So if we’re introducing maybe a little extra error, then we need to take that into account and that tends to be what all of the new research is reconfirming for us when it comes to tele-assessment.
Probably the biggest advance in tele-assessment is coming [00:23:00] with new measures and methods. When we think about those new measures that are coming out, I gave my first WAIS-5 last week. Susie Raiford, who authors it has created a Nonmotor Full Scale index that is just built in.
It’s got slightly different subtests that you can give, but it is fully non-motor. It is fully administratable. You can administer it fully remotely online. It’s already built for that.
When we get the new Woodcock-Johnson V coming out in the spring, it is being fully developed online. It’s on the computer digitally. I shouldn’t say online because it’s not being fully developed really for remote specifically, but it is being fully developed in the digital space.
And so more and more, [00:24:00] as Diana mentioned, our world is becoming more digital. It’s not going anywhere. Digital education is happening. Our kids are way more digitally native than we are. I’m very old. Especially compared to someone like me, our kids are fluent and they interact with people in this way very naturally.
So the landscape of tele-assessment isn’t going anywhere. We are going to continue to do the research to validate it and make sure we know what is valid and what is not, what is ethical and what is not. We’re going to keep moving on this. And as new tests come out in new formats, we will test the crap out of those too.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. So where are y’all at? What does the tele-assessment implementation look like for Parallel? I’m curious because there is so much. [00:25:00] There are a lot of people out there who are doing so much more tele-assessment, like I said, than I am these days, but I feel like the challenging part feels like the performance-based measures, that feels hard. I’m super curious how y’all are implementing this consistently and in a standardized way and so forth.
Dr. Jordan: It’s a great question because when I think about the work that I do personally, and I have done in my private practice or in my clinic, I think about Zoom, I think about how I can display materials and how it can have fidelity with that.
The thing that has been super exciting for me that Diana alluded to, I get to nerd out with engineers and product people every single week. At Parallel, specifically, we’ve gotten to design and develop our own platform. So we have our own telehealth [00:26:00] platform that we get to design and develop how we want. We get to build the guardrails.
We are in a privileged position where we get to partner with and consult with and contract with and thought partner with the Pearson’s and the Riverside’s out there, and the PARs and whoever else. We license the materials directly from our testing partners and build it in, in our platform, that we don’t have to worry about
is this remaining faithful to the research? Is this remaining faithful to what it would look like if I were there with an easel or with a stimulus book or anything like that.
We get to build in all of the guardrails and dictate the batteries as well. So that full-scale IQ, if we’re not in a mood, which we’re not, to send blocks [00:27:00] to a rural school and never see them again, those blocks are more expensive than you would think, then we have worked to develop the workarounds to look at the Block Design Multiple Choice and think through what has been validated in this space to replicate that full-scale IQ in an ethical and valid manner.
We get to help our providers. We get to educate our providers. When they join us, they have to sit through a video of me doing it and showing them how to do this and walking them through what a WISC-V looks like in tele-assessment, what a WAIS-IV, soon a WAIS-V, looks like in the tele-assessment context so that they know how to do it.
We enable them, we give them the education, we give them the NASPCEs that they need to be able to do [00:28:00] this in the most valid and ethical way. We also then have a robust quality support program. We have an amazing team of focus because it’s on the tele-assessment side of school psychologists, who are on our leadership team and work with us to make sure that they are ready to administer it in a valid way, to make sure that they understand how to use our platform and do everything they need to do to make sure the kids get the most valid results they can get.
We video record so that we can spot-check and make sure that no one’s getting a little lazy. We’ve all been there. I do it. I get lazy. The more I do this, and I probably phone in some things. I need that check. We all need that check every once in a while.
We all know the research out there on how many mistakes are happening in IQ tests from licensed professionals. The research shows that [00:29:00] mistakes are happening left, right, and center, hugely rampant in the field.
And so we spot-check, we make sure we are doing on ongoing quality, we can call it quality assurance, I call it quality support, so that when these psychologists are doing it, if they have a problem, they can always reach out to us for extra support or extra practice, or they’re like, I’ve forgotten how to access the norms for Block Design Multiple Choice, or what this means for a non-motor full-scale score or something like that, they can reach out to us and get support and feedback immediately.
But also we spot-check them and make sure that they are constantly vigilant about doing this the right way because this is so new to the world. So many of us are just learning this. We didn’t learn it in graduate school.
There are a few very early career folks who maybe [00:30:00] did learn a little bit of tele-assessment in graduate school, but most of us were having to re-upskill ourselves. We’re having to relearn how to do this in this new virtual space, so we want to be there to make sure they are fully supported in doing that.
Dr. Sharp: I love that. Just to read between the lines a little bit, it sounds like y’all have created a very cool proprietary platform that nobody else can access that does this really well.
You’re doing something different, I say that in the most like admirable way possible, but it sounds like y’all are doing something different in a sense than the rest of folks in private practice. You’re not sitting there fumbling with setting up the Zoom set up and the difficulties of tele-assessment that a lot of us have had to deal with over the years in managing materials and what to show [00:31:00] when and how to do it and all that. You built that into a platform, which sounds amazing.
Dr. Jordan: You were mentioning the 3 buckets, there are three overarching themes that drive the work I do here at Parallel. One of them is access. We’ve talked about that. I want to make sure more kids have easy, quick, immediate, necessary access to the assessments they need to the services they need.
The 2nd bucket that I think of as driving the work that I do is ease. If we can use technology to make a psychologist’s job easier, we’re going to do it. If we’re going to think about ways to organize the real estate on the screen that helps our providers not get distracted by, oh, I need to open this up in this test publisher’s website and then share that and go back and forth.
And then I have [00:32:00] a 3rd publisher that I need to, within one platform, we’re trying to make it as easy as possible. This goes for tele-assessment; this also goes for our services. There are so many things that we need our psychologist brains for. When I’m writing a report, I need my psychologist brain to make a conclusion, to make that ultimate diagnosis, to do that.
There are hundreds of little things that we do not need our psychologist brain for like those tables at the end of reports. So in addition to our tele-assessment platform for administration, we’ve developed a report writer. We’re about to launch Report Writer 2.0, which I’m super excited about, but we’re thinking and of course, everybody’s thinking about what can AI do?
There are great little standalone products that are out there that are starting to move in that direction. The first place I wanted to [00:33:00] intervene and I get to nerd out with some engineers was, there’s so much error if I have to transfer scores from a score report into my data tables at the end, and then from the data tables to the content, I was like, how can we bypass this?
So our engineers quickly, easily created a system where any of the printouts that I get from the platforms, from our publishers, from all of these most widely used tests and measures, all I have to do is upload them and they are automatically in our report.
They’re in our report in tables at the end. They’re in our report in the meat with some rudimentary interpretation of specific scores so that when I need to go in and work on my report, I’ve got a little bullet list of all the things that are measuring verbal skills or all the things that are measuring anxiety from [00:34:00] all the different reporters and they’re right there in a little list, I just have to write my little summary sentence. I just have to use my psychologist brain to reconcile.
If there are differences in what teachers are seeing, parents are saying, and kids are self-reporting, I need my brain to see that clearly. That’s already done for me. And then make an interpretation. What does this actually mean for this kid?
So ease is that second thing? And yes, we have built this proprietary platform that not everyone has access to. We’re also iterating on it. We are constantly trying to improve our platform.
We’re constantly listening to our providers, our psychologists who are using it for testing and hearing what they would think would make it easier and trying to build a better platform so that they can have an easier life and do what they should be doing; focus more time on working with those kids, focus more time on doing the tasks that their [00:35:00] psychology brain needs to be doing.
Diana: Let me add a quick point there too, one thing that is unique about working with school districts to do assessments is that every school district also has a slightly different expectation of what a report looks like. And so by building technology, as Jordan’s explained, we can help guide the provider to generate a report that is going to be exactly to the school specifications without creating that headache for a provider where every single time they’re working with a different school district, all of a sudden there’s different expectations of them.
And so that’s the way that we like to think about product is how do we, to Jordan point, make this easier on a psychologist to do their job, to focus on working with that student and think about what the student needs and not all of this headache of the administrative work.
And then the other part I was going to touch on, [00:36:00] other exciting part is by having this community of providers of all different backgrounds, we also are able to crowdsource in things like interventions that can help different students. And so we are also thinking about how can we integrate the network and community of psychologists and other professionals on the platform to ensure that those reports and then the ongoing care that students are getting are what that student needs.
We’ve got so many amazing professionals on the platform. We want to be able to give everyone a voice in helping provide guidance to each of their peers.
Dr. Jordan: And to that point, we’re going to focus more on the testing, because this is The Testing Psychologist podcast, but I talked about two of the buckets that drive me access and ease, the third one, to Diana’s point is innovation. The more we can tech enable especially our ongoing services, the more we can deepen the work [00:37:00] that we’re doing.
We can think about ways to provide kids with activities and games and more exciting work that can reinforce the work that we’re doing with them one-on-one in a way that is much harder to do in-person. So we are trying to work toward innovating and we collect a lot of data.
Obviously, I’m a researcher and a nerd at heart so we are collecting outcomes and trying to show, is what we’re doing working? Is our outcomes for our students, can we make them better than general statistics in the special education system which is not always serving the best interest of every kid within the special education system? I’ll say that. Can we deepen the work through tech innovation in a way that improves outcomes for kids?
So those are the 3 buckets that drive a lot of the strategy that I have [00:38:00] in approaching the work with product, approaching the work with our clinical team, our leadership and everything else.
Dr. Sharp: I think that’s fair. There’s so much more, even on a very concrete level, we can get so many more data points when we’re doing things within a software system, recording, auditing, action activity logs and all of that. There’s so much, even on a very basic level that we can look at that no human can track that stuff when we’re interacting with kids or administering whatever, that’s great. I love the data possibilities.
Dr. Jordan: And I’ll say, I shouldn’t say this out loud, I am far from a Luddite. I am definitely tech savvy and I’m good at technology. That being said, I have met some of the most brilliant tech minds I have ever worked with in my life or seen or witnessed in my life.
If I say, I would love some data on [00:39:00] eye tracking during this measure, they’ll be like, we’ll get on that. If I’m saying, let’s think through what would better outcomes actually mean and look like, they’ll think with me through what they can get through our platform, what they can collect and they have done stuff that I would never have even imagined was possible.
I feel very privileged and I feel very lucky to be able to work with some really amazing people with great technical engineering and product minds that helped me get more creative about what we can collect and how we can use those data.
Dr. Sharp: It’s a super cool experience. I’ve had a touch of that myself with software development over the last few years. It’s cool to get outside of our little world and interact with folks who think about things a little bit differently. The brainstorming and the [00:40:00] collaborations is really cool.
I’m jealous you get to do it all the time. That’s the best part here. It’s funny that you mentioned the first thing that you did was automate the table creation. That is literally the first thing that we did as well with Reverb, our report-writing software, 3 years ago.
It was like, we have to figure out these fucking tables. These are terrible. How do we stop putting scores in tables? It’s a shared pain point, that’s for sure.
Dr. Jordan: Yeah. It’s one everyone listening has struggled with.
Dr. Sharp: 100%. We’re in this tech realm, so maybe we talk more about this tech enablement, other technology if there’s other, if there are other things to chat about as far as Parallel and how you are empowering the clinicians to utilize technology within the platform. Are there other points to [00:41:00] touch on here?
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Dr. Jordan: There are lots. I’m trying to focus this more on the assessment side for this particular audience but we do quite a bit of work around [00:43:00] making the administrative tasks of our school psychologists, our SLPs, our educators, our social workers much more user-friendly.
We have a tool that we’ve built in that can help track IEP goals as an example. In a session, we have a sidebar, and based on whatever your goal is, if your goal is to get a student to ask a particular type of question this many times, spontaneously, you can have a little counter that you can just press every time it happens or something needing fewer prompts, we’ve got two counters, you can say they did it this time and they needed this many prompts.
So based on what type of goal you have, we have this way of keeping track of it within the session to reduce the need for charting after the fact. These sorts of things are, [00:44:00] technologically, they’re quite interesting and savvy and take quite a bit of building even though to me, it’s like oh, it’s just this little counter. How easy is that?
So we are trying to do that with charting, with planning. We are working toward and we have some partnerships with evidence-based curricula around social-emotional development, SEL skills around speech around treating anxiety, depression, around reading for our special education teachers, we’ve got an evidence-based science of reading curriculum around reading and writing. We’ve got math tools.
We’ve got all this stuff that is built into our platform so that you can use it seamlessly and it allows you to spend less time prepping. It allows you to spend a lot less time getting everything ready, planning for [00:45:00] each individual kid, trying to remember what this kid like going back in their chart and saying oh, this kid, last session, last week, 35 kids ago, did this and I have to remind myself and now I have to plan this session.
We can keep track of what happened in that last session, and that can pop up right in your new session to remind you and say what’s next in our curriculum or what more practice needs to happen based on how they did last time is this. So we can do a lot.
We are constantly, like I said, iterating and trying to improve all of the work we’re doing with the report writer, with the tele-assessment platform, with the teletherapy side of the platform as well. We’re constantly trying to push the boundaries of what tech can enable us to do and allow us to focus and do better.
[00:46:00] Diana: Yeah, I echo all of that. Only things I would add is they were also using technology internally to help figure out where our team should also be spending time.As Jordan mentioned, we have clinical managers on staff who come from all different provider backgrounds, from school psychology to speech and language therapy, special education teachers and so on, and for them to figure out where they should be spending their time, how best to support providers, they can see where are students progressing or which providers are helping students progress the most, where are things a little stuck? So being able to utilize our own resources to drive the best outcomes for students.
Everything we build while we’ve just touched on a ton of different stakeholders who touch the product and the technology, it all comes from this general ethos of how do we drive the best outcomes for students? What that usually looks like is meeting compliance deadlines for assessment. So [00:47:00] what is the fastest we can get kids answers? What are their hurdles or barriers, and how can we work forward from there?
And then once the student does have an IEP in place, how quickly can we help them meet those goals? As Jordan touched on, there’s so many different ways that we can support that from our hands-on support of providers, which might be tech-enabled, but then also the ways that we’re working with curriculum companies and the ways that we’re building tools for engaging those students and so forth. We’re taking a very multifaceted approach, as you can probably tell.
Dr. Jordan: I’ll add two specific initiatives that I get really excited about. One is in all the work we do, including our assessment sessions, we use routine outcome monitoring. So we ask kids after every session, how they’re doing and how their therapist is doing so that we can get a little bit of a snapshot of, it’s like a little satisfaction survey.
We know that [00:48:00] the research has shown that even asking kids to do this tends to improve outcomes, whether or not we even look at the data. It gives them some stake in it if they think their provider is listening to them and cares about how they feel about how they’re doing and how the session went.
We do also look at the data. We do look to make sure that our kids are having a good experience in our online platform. We do know, everyone here knows it, that sometimes testing sessions are not super pleasant for kids. Not every kid loves sitting for an IQ test.
Diana: It’s shocking.
Dr. Jordan: I know. It’s shocking. Think about it, a kid who’s struggling with reading and I’m going to give them a Woodcock-Johnson or a WIAT. I’m going to tell them to read. No, that’s not fun at all.
So we take that into account, of course, but we are using the data to help providers, to help our psychologists and our SLPs and everybody else think through the work that they’re doing. So [00:49:00] we can cut the data and think about if you’re working across the age spectrum and you are just so much better at working with little kids and they’re all loving it.
Your high schoolers are like, I’m not feeling it. How can we support you to be better at working with the high schoolers? Maybe we need a different provider to work with those high schoolers and give you more young kids.
We can think through using the data that we get in a way that reinforms the work we’re doing. We try and support our providers to use that data to reinform their interventions, to reinform the way they’re interacting with different types of kids, to think through it.
And then the other thing that I get really excited about, which is again, more behind the scenes, like Diana was talking about is we have a provider support dashboard. We’re big on dashboards. We love our dashboards at Parallel.
Dr. Sharp: I love a good dashboard.
Dr. Jordan: Our product and engineering team will set up a dashboard to give me a snapshot [00:50:00] of where different providers are asking for support, where different providers are needing help, where they’re doing really well. We’ve got little champion buttons. We try and elevate our providers.
Also, we want to know if every provider is struggling the first time they log into a certain test, every provider is taking 2 minutes to log into this particular test. That helps us understand:
1. Maybe we need to go back to product and say, we need an easier way to launch this test.
2. We need to go back to provider education and say, oh, when you get onboarded, I need to spend 5 minutes, I need to show you a video of exactly how to launch this test.
We can intervene in those ways to reinform the work we’re doing. We think it makes it easier. We have a lot of feedback from our providers [00:51:00] but I’ve also got my own biases of what’s easy for me. I think something is going to work and make everything easier. We think our platform looks great, but there may be some things that it looks great to me but isn’t actually working out. So we try and reinform through data as much as possible, the ecosystem that we are building.
Dr. Sharp: I love that data-driven everything. This is where we’re headed. It’s great.
Diana: There is a tech company somewhere within Parallel, it’s clear from that answer.
Dr. Sharp: I’m holding back from getting in the weeds on how you manage all that data, obtain it, consent, and all that kind of stuff, but we’ll just put that to the side. Maybe that’s another podcast.
I do want to talk about the actual partnerships with the school districts, though. I asked this question in our pre-podcast chat and we can maybe lead with this. I’m curious about [00:52:00] the reception that y’all have gotten from the different districts, because I could see it going two different directions and maybe more but I’m curious about your experience so far.
Diana: I can jump in and then Jordan, you probably have a lot of talking points here as well from your own experience jumping in on customer calls. I would say it looks really different based off of who the perspective or current customer is, and what the demographics of that district look like.
For a small rural school district versus a large urban district, their use case for using an outsourced provider in the first place, nevertheless, teletherapy provider is going to look very different from the next. In a more rural setting, there might not be any other alternative unless that provider is going to literally fall from the stars.
They’re probably not going to get a new school psychologist in the door when [00:53:00] it’s already October.
That might look really different in an urban setting, but you also are dealing with much larger number of students and a large fluctuation of students being different services. And so in that sense, a solution like Parallel is incredibly flexible.
We’ve got a number of different types of providers as you can tell under one umbrella. Our contracts are written relatively flexibly for school districts to be able to utilize their time with us in different ways.
All that’s to say, I wouldn’t say there’s one specific school district archetype that is the Parallel customer but we see districts coming to us for all different types of reasons. Always there is an underlying challenge around staffing and we are able to ultimately solve that.
More and more, we’re seeing districts be able to come to us especially as we [00:54:00] develop our reputation in the space as this clinically forward company is that being as we started this podcast, a better alternative to potentially hiring on the ground.
Even all the stuff we just talked about from a data standpoint, most districts don’t have that data on their own providers. So it’s much easier when you think of the role of a special education director to be able to justify that they are doing a good job in their job. Their goal is to have kids meet their IEP goals, maybe even graduate those kids out of special education, utilize their resources as well as possible.
And so we are looking at our relationship with school districts truly of that as a partner to be able to give them what they need to be able to go back to their superiors, but also the parents of these students and feel exceptional about the support that they are getting.
Dr. Jordan: When I think about the different types of [00:55:00] partners, certainly they’re all over the place. We’ve got urban, we’ve got rural, we’ve got suburban, we’ve got all of that kind of stuff.
I do think of 2 buckets of types of school partners that we end up with right now. We have those that are desperate, we have those who have staffing shortages, they’re out of compliance, they have a need that they need to fill and they are looking to staff. And that’s okay. We’re there to help.
The others are the more innovative districts, those who actually want to innovate and think about doing better for their students. I’m thinking of a particular district we work with, for example, in a specialized school district with incarcerated youth where it’s harder to do good work in that context in-person, and we’ve found some workarounds where sometimes maybe you need a portable Wi-Fi to get them [00:56:00] online because that’s not as easy and other things like that.
So we do have those innovative partners that are, I shouldn’t say this, they’re all fun to work with, but they’re really fun to work with. They’re more forward-thinking and forward-looking, clinically oriented partners.
The one thing that we pride ourselves on clinically is we do try to integrate into schools and school systems. We do not necessarily want to be just an outsourced person to do some assessments and we never see anyone. We want to integrate into those eligibility meetings, into the IEP meetings, into the discussions. We love pushing in our providers to staff and faculty meetings.
We want to partner with the school and become part of a school community so that we are not a temporary staffing solution because you’re desperate. For [00:57:00] those schools that are desperate, for those districts that are desperate, we’re fine. We will plug in, but we want to show you that we can be a solid partner.
We want to show you that we know you could probably go to a temp agency or a real staffing type of company and probably get these 20 evaluations done but we actually want to be a partner to you. We want to show you all of the clinical potential we have to up resource you and think about improving your outcomes with your kids.
Diana: Only add to that to say that we’re also taking, or I would say the goal is to take a lot of burden off of the district itself in the sense of all of that clinical support that we’ve touched on here is a huge win for the district. That is otherwise support that needs to be given by your on-campus staff.
And those staff [00:58:00] providers don’t even have time in the first place to see all the students, nevertheless, then manage an outsourced provider or a new provider to the mix, and we want to take that headache off of the district and we will happily take that on.
But even some of the ways that we’re using technology like I pointed out with the report writer, for example, being able to tailor it to district’s needs and so on. We want to make this truly seamless for district so that they are simply meeting their compliance goals, making their life easier and in the same time, making the experience for the provider who is staffed in those districts as positive as possible.
Dr. Jordan: I want to add one thing. I can’t tell you how many school psychologists I have talked to and worked with who are this close, my fingers are very close together, to burning out. They are feeling like testing machines.
A lot of the school psychologists that I [00:59:00] work with, a lot of our own providers, this is not why they became a school psychologist. It was not to be a robot just doing WISC after WISC after Woodcock-Johnson after Woodcock-Johnson all day long every day.
So some of these innovative districts are calling in for backup. They’re using us for backup to allow their on-the-ground personnel to vary their workload a bit. If we can take some of the testings off of them, some of the evaluations off of them, it frees them up to do a little group with some kids and talk to them and do some therapy or do some of the other things that are not just spending their entire day testing, report writing.
I was just saying before this podcast, I’m just finishing up a paper right now on self-care for educators and for special education support staff and providers. We know that varying up [01:00:00] the work that you’re doing can help you reaffirm your values; why you did this in the first place so that you don’t feel like that robot that day in and day out is just going through the motions and doing these assessments.
So that’s in between the innovators and the desperate, they don’t want to lose their school psychologists, they don’t want to lose their SLPs. They want to give them a little bit of relief and we are great at pushing in and partnering with those schools and school districts to offer some of that relief and allow for that variety in what they’re doing day to day.
Diana: One more thing to add on that, we are going back and forth at this point, but it also helps the school district a lot in the sense that if you’re on campus provider, you can double down and focus on maybe those more complex students. And getting them in depth air, then we can work with the [01:01:00] 75% of other students to just go through their re-evaluations.
There are a lot of parts of what the district is trying to triage that are relatively easy for us to be able to take on in a limited capacity. And so it’s is also a helpful tool for the districts themselves to figure out how to best utilize their resources and make sure that all of the kids are getting exactly what they need.
I also see this as being a really important factor with districts that might have a parent population, for example, who might not be entirely supportive of virtual. Then your on-campus school psychologist can spend time with that 25% of students who have parents who want that in-person care who might have that more complex list of difficulties to handle.
In that sense, it’s just creating capacity and freeing up on-campus resources to go exactly where you as a special education director need them to go.
Dr. Sharp: I got you. I was going to ask about the response from [01:02:00] parents. It’s a sidebar question as well. How do the districts present your involvement in this process? I’ll end the question there. How are parents informed and how does that work?
Dr. Jordan: Do you want me to answer that?
Diana: Go ahead.
Dr. Jordan: Schools are ultimately responsible for getting consent. When we talk about getting consent for everything we’re doing, schools are ultimately responsible.
I write a lot of white papers. For those who are unfamiliar with white papers, they’re a summary of the research. They’re not peer reviewed. They’re not any of that. I try and summarize the research to enable schools to talk about what is valid, why this is valid, to give them talking points.
Occasionally, they’ll tag us in if they’re facing some heavy defensiveness [01:03:00] around virtual. It hasn’t happened much at all. I think parents understand the limitations. Parents want their kid to be seen. Parents want their kid to have the services that they need to have in order to succeed.
Certainly there have been some vocal parents who are like, I don’t want this. This is terrible. That’s fine. It is ultimately up to our school partner, but we try and partner with them really well. We try and give them the white papers, give them talking points, give them what they need to have in order to advocate for doing the services the way they need to.
Sometimes it just comes down to, do you want your kid to get services or not? We don’t have an in-person provider so your option is to do it this way or we can postpone a year and your kid will not get services for this extra year, and they may developmentally lag behind.
That’s a terrible way to look at it, but sometimes [01:04:00] that’s the reality is that they may not have the resources to do it any other way but we’re here to partner with our schools, we’re here to jump in when we need to jump in. I’ll let parents pepper me with questions and I will push my glasses up and nerd out on them about the research and I will happily send them all of my papers or send them the tele-assessment book, which reviews all their research.
We’ll do what we need to do. I will say we haven’t had that much pushback from families around consent or around doing it this way.
Dr. Sharp: That’s great. Our time is flying. There’s so much we can talk about, so many side roads we did not turn down, but maybe we start to close with what it’s like being a provider for Parallel if there are any folks out there who might be interested.
Dr. Jordan: I’ll take this one.
Diana: I was going to send this one straight to you, Jordan.
Dr. Jordan: Good. [01:05:00] We are trying to build a strong provider network. We don’t accept just everybody. We have a very selective set of algorithms to think about in who we partner with as our providers.
Obviously, we offer a lot of flexibility. We work with our providers to think about how much time they can give, what time they want to give to this and in return, we try to support them in every way we can. We try and listen to them. We engage them in discussions around our product.
Obviously, we pay for their time whenever they are meeting with our head of product who’s awesome and giving her feedback. We have monthly provider meetings where we try and highlight providers who have specific skills.
[01:06:00] I’m thinking on our speech-language pathology side, we have one provider who is an expert in helping kids work with AACs, these devices and it is just not a skill that everybody has. And so we’re like, please talk to us about it. Upscale us.We are a NASP-approved CE provider. We’re NASP-approved for speech-language pathology. So we do webinars. We’re trying to build a community. It’s not perfect.
When we hire, we can’t guarantee that we have a placement for you in a particular school or this many hours or that kind of stuff. We do try to meet you halfway around flexibility. The more you can offer us, the more we can offer you.
Around partnering, we do try our best during the summer to engage [01:07:00] providers in little projects because we know summers are tougher if you’re not making that money. If we want to double down on improving our report writer, then we may take the summer and say, let’s get a little cadre of school psychologists together in some thought leadership work around our report writer and think about what’s out of the box stuff that we haven’t even thought about yet that you could guide us toward improving.
We are trying our best to do well by our providers, to give them as much support as we can give them. Our clinical managers are very available and making sure that our providers are doing the best work that they can do, the most fulfilling work that they can do, knowing that, don’t tell anyone I said this, but sometimes schools are hard to partner with. Sometimes schools are not the clearest in their policies, or they are grumpy.
I hate to say that, but sometimes schools are grumpy. [01:08:00] So we try and help facilitate those relationships the best we can. We’ve got not only our clinical team, but we’ve got a customer support team. Every single school partner that we work with has a dedicated customer support person that helps them with any tech issues, with any glitches, with any miscommunications, with figuring out how best to organize how their kids are seen so that our providers don’t have to do that.
We’re working toward and constantly improving our providers doing the work that they should be doing. There’s always going to be some administrative, what we call indirect time that they are getting their billing for, and they’re getting paid for, but we’re trying to reduce that as much as possible through our teams, through our tech, through our product, through everything else.
Diana: The only other [01:09:00] thing I would add was that I think Parallel is a unique journey. No matter what stage you’re at in your career, whether you’re a psychologist or a different type of provider who is joining us, we do extremely thorough onboarding for all different domains. If you’re new to the field, this is a great place to start your career and get a lot of guidance and support.
To pimp out Jordan for a second, you get to work with Dr. Jordan Wright who’s pretty amazing, and our entire team of clinical managers who are all exceptional and have years and years of experience each independently in their domains.
And so an incredibly exciting place, whether you’re new to your career, or if you are potentially in that more burnt out camp, and you want to get some more flexibility and be in a little bit more control than working in the district itself.
We have providers from all different backgrounds here. We, as Jordan just touched on, want to meet providers where they’re at and make this the best [01:10:00] step in their career. And so there’s a lot of different ways the Parallel experience can go but the point being is that you’re getting a lot of support in all cases and access to some really cool people and some really cool technology and a great mission.
Dr. Jordan: And the one thing I’ll add, just because we keep popcorning back and forth is we also value mentorship. There are mentorship opportunities on both sides. You can be a mentor and a mentee to newer providers and to our clinical managers who are great mentors. We take that seriously.
We take professional development seriously. It’s why I did a webinar last week on neurodiversity and executive functioning and how to upskill kids in executive functioning when you’re working with neurodivergent kids. I try to do as much as I can to upskill our providers [01:11:00] and mentor them as best as I can as well.
Dr. Sharp: That’s amazing. Y’all present a really compelling picture from top to bottom of what you’re up to over there. Thanks so much for being here.
It’s cool to talk to both of you who I met in different contexts and bringing it all together. I love talking about tech and ways to advance our field and the work that we do, so grateful for y’all for being here to do that with me.
Dr. Jordan: Thank you so much for having us.
Diana: Thank you for having us.
Dr. Sharp: All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode, always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes so make sure to check those out.
If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast.
If you’re a practice owner or [00:12:00] aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out The Testing Psychologist mastermind groups. I have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development; beginner, intermediate and advanced. We have homework, we have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting.
If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call, we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
The information contained in this podcast and on The Testing Psychologist website are intended [00:13:00] for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast or on the website is intended to be a substitute for professional, psychological, psychiatric, or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
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