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[00:00:00] Hey y’all, welcome back to The Testing Psychologist podcast. This is episode 42.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of The Testing Psychologist podcast. It has been quite a while since I have talked to y’all. I think the last episode came out on December 30th. Goodness, that feels like a long time ago. I guess it has only been about three weeks, but good to be back and recording some more episodes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the podcast over the last few weeks and I have some great episodes in the queue I think. Good interviews coming up and have dialed in a few topics through the Facebook group. So I’m excited. It’s great to be back on the podcast today.

Today is a solo [00:01:00] episode. I’m going to be talking with y’all about marketing again.

Now, we’ve talked about marketing two different times on the podcast and had some guests who talked about marketing here on the podcast. John Clarke is the first one that comes to mind. He was just a few episodes back, but marketing, I think is worth revisiting time and time because it’s something that continually comes up and something that people always have questions about. So I wanted to touch back in and do what I would call a marketing roundup.

By a marketing roundup, I mean, I want to run down some of the ways that we can market our practices and touch on some things that might be a little bit more obscure than others, put it all out there here in one episode for y’all to listen to. I have a variety of ideas about how and where to market your practice.

I think this is [00:02:00] timely as the new year gets going. A lot of people are redoing a financial plan or business plan for the upcoming year, setting goals, that kind of thing. And marketing is a big part of that process in gathering referrals for your practice. So, let’s go ahead and dive into some of that.

I’m going to start talking about what I’ll call face-to-face or person-to-person marketing efforts. There are a lot of professions and other folks in our communities that I think we can market to face-to-face or by reaching out and inviting them to meet with us directly. I’ll talk in just a bit about one set of people where it is probably not helpful to try to reach out and meet them face to face, but we’ll save that here for just a little bit later.

In terms of the folks who seem to be easier to meet face to face, there are several folks on that list. The most obvious are other mental health professionals. [00:03:00] It’s easy to go through Psychology Today or whatever local directory you might use, or connect with other people in your community if there’s a community mental health practitioner Facebook group, that can be a great way to identify other practitioners, but that’s a great place to start. 

I always say that it makes a lot of sense to network and connect with therapists who see the kind of clients you would want to be evaluating. It seems like a no-brainer, right? For me, I evaluate kids. I tend to go toward child therapists and adolescent therapists. Other folks, of course, if you’re working with older adults, you might network with people who are doing pain management kind of therapy or relationships, depression, anxiety- adult therapists. It’s pretty straightforward.

The other [00:04:00] mental health practitioners, excuse me, who I tend to meet a lot with our other testing folks. I know that some cities or towns have a little bit more of an air of competition and that’s unfortunate as far as I’m concerned. I think that it’s worth it to go for it; reach out to other testing folks and approach that meeting as if you are trying to build relationships in the community.

There’s sometimes a saturation of folks doing testing in a given community. So there might be a lot of folks to meet with, but that’s all right. In some communities, there might not be very many testing folks. In that case, you can hopefully bond and join together and get on the same page with what it’s like to be doing testing in that [00:05:00] community.

So the idea behind all of this is that eventually, even though it may seem like you’re networking with your competition, one or both of you are going to get full eventually and you’re going to need referral sources. So it really, I think can do nothing but help you to reach out to folks who are also doing testing in your community and try to connect with them.

Now, other folks seem to be good face-to-face marketing people. Psychiatrists tend to do pretty well with face-to-face marketing. They’re also a great referral source for us, for both adults and children. Attorneys, I think are great face-to-face networking sources. They are often not quite as busy as physicians, so you can get face-to-face time with them.

I should back up. When I say face-to-face time, I mean going to coffee, going to [00:06:00] lunch. I think it always makes sense to offer to pay if you’re the one who initiates the interaction. Just to make that clear, I’m not talking about necessarily going to these people’s offices or office hours or whatever, breaking in and trying to meet with them. Sending messages, letting them know what you do, and inviting them out to coffee. I have yet to have someone turn me down for that, at least in our community.

Now, other folks that can do face-to-face marketing. School counselors and school staff I think are great. Again, they can be a little bit busy, but a lot of them at least have a lunch break or would be willing to meet after school. I have found those folks to be great referral sources as well.

Now, one group of individuals who I think are great face-to-face marketing folks are other parents or families. This is something that I teach in my [00:07:00] Private Practice Rocks workshop, which is a workshop I give to grad students here in the community and other professionals too, but it tends to be a lot of grad students. I jump on board with this idea that whether we like it or not, everything that you do in your community is marketing to some degree because everyone is a potential referral source.

What that means is, for those of you who tend to be a little bit more introverted, this is something to keep in mind as you’re out in the community. If you have kids, you’re hanging out at the playground with other parents. If you are spending time with other adults, anyone that you might be spending time with or hanging out with, it seems like the conversation inevitably turns to what people do for work and I think [00:08:00] it’s worth it to get comfortable with talking about what you do and what kind of work you’re performing and find a way to talk about assessment in a way that’s palatable or user friendly for folks out in the community.

I think the other side of that is that you have to keep in mind to some degree that the way you present yourself in the community is going to make a difference in how people see you and how people refer to you. I have been reminded of this many times when I’ve been at a playground with my kids and sometimes it’s around other parents from school, sometimes we’re just out at a random playground or something, and I am always conscious of how I’m interacting with my kids, what people might see me doing and how I talk to them. Not that I’m berating them in private or anything, but [00:09:00] trying to be on your best behavior as much as possible.

This happened to me this past weekend when I had my oldest at a playground. He is a kiddo that I’ve talked about before on the podcast. He is pretty sensitive. He is, I think, a touch anxious and has trouble with emotional regulation sometimes. He’s 6 years old. We’re at the playground. We were playing basketball, playing soccer, whatnot, and he’s just having a rough day. He was crying more frequently than usual, getting upset, and changing the rules of the game. It didn’t feel fair. I was cheating. That kind of stuff. Maybe this sounds familiar to some of you who have kiddos or nephews or nieces or whatever.

Anyway, after a half hour or so of that kind of thing, I was getting a little frustrated. I had taken a break and had walked away from him [00:10:00] and he was following after me and was yelling a little bit and trying to initiate another game. Lo and behold, he sees somebody on the other side of the playground from his school. So he goes on to talk to that kiddo. And soon the kid’s mom comes down to talk to me. We’d been sharing the playground with this family for a while, but it just took him a while to notice that this kid went to his school.

Anyway, this mom comes down and it turns out she is a high school counselor and she works at a school that I have seen a lot of kids from, but we never talked in person. She introduced herself and I said, what’s your last name? That sounds familiar. And she said the same. She’s like, Oh my goodness. I’ve read your reports.

So it was just another reminder that, like it or not, we are visible in the community and [00:11:00] what we do and how we interact with others, it makes a difference.

That was a little bit of a long story just to say that anytime you’re out in the community interacting with anyone, that’s an opportunity to do “marketing”. So, being talkative, being inquisitive, being kind, all of those qualities, even though it’s not explicitly marketing, you’re not trying to make a sale right at that point, it’s still important.

So like I said, if you’re an introvert, you might have to work a little bit to put yourself out there, to approach that group of parents, to break into that group of peers and join the conversation just to put yourself out there.

So, those are the folks that I have found are pretty amenable to face-to-face marketing.

Now the one group of [00:12:00] people who I have found is hard to do face-to-face marketing to are physicians. I think there are ways that you can get in front of them, but generally, when I’m trying to connect with a medical practice, I’m going to go through the referral coordinator more than the actual physicians. Nearly every medical practice of any size will have a referral coordinator. That person is often a mental health professional, like a social worker or a counselor, at least in our community.

You can usually get ahold of that person just by calling the office. So you can call and ask if the referral coordinator is in. If they’re not, you can always leave a message, but if they are, you can get them on the phone, and through that person, you might be able to do any number of things. If they’re the ones that handle all of the referrals, which they usually are, you can say something like, [00:13:00] “Hey, I just wanted to check in with you. I’m a psychologist here in town and I do testing. Not a lot of people do testing. So I just wanted to check with you to see who you’re referring to for testing and if that’s a gap that I might be able to fill?”

I advocate being direct and kind, not pushy, anything like that, but putting it out there and saying, this is what I do. Is that a need that you have? You’ll get varying responses, but that’s a good way to get in the door. If you’re not able to get in touch with the referral coordinator, you can always send a letter to them and then follow up with another phone call a couple of weeks after you send the letter.

Once you get in some contact with the referral coordinator, you might get lucky and they say, yes, that is a gap in our referral sources. We would love to [00:14:00] talk with you more about that. Can you send us more information? And then you’re in the door. Now, if it takes a little while, you might ask that person if they handle the physician meetings or if there’s an office manager who handles the physician meetings.

Often at bigger group physician practices, they’ll do a lunch and learn or a weekly or bimonthly meeting where they all get together and learn about a specific topic or sit down with one another to talk about cases and that kind of thing. I’ve gotten to go down to several lunch and learns with different practices. Sometimes they ask for specific information. 

This big pediatric practice in our area asked if I could bring our entire referral list because they needed therapist referrals, OT referrals, and referrals to different services in the community. So I was [00:15:00] happy to share that with them and we were able to talk about other providers in the community and how to serve people the best we could.

They might ask for something specific like education on a specific topic like anxiety or ADHD or learning disorders or cognitive decline, whatever it might be, and I would leap at those opportunities.

So, like I said, physicians are hard to get in front of, actual face-to-face with the physician, but the referral coordinator is a great way to go. The office manager can also help you out if you ever want to do a lunch and learn. And again, in those instances, be prepared. I would ask on the phone if you get that opportunity to say or to ask rather whether you should buy lunch or whether lunch is provided and just be prepared to buy lunch if you need to do that.

As we move on, I’m going to transition away [00:16:00] from talking about face-to-face or even not face-to-face marketing with people and talk more about well, non-people marketing. This dips into the world of online presence, online marketing, marketing strategy, that kind of thing.

Like I mentioned at the beginning, I had John Clarke on the podcast a few episodes ago. John is from Unconditional Media, who is a media company. They specialize in Online advertising and SEO and that sort of thing specifically for therapists. So you can listen to that episode and get a better sense of what I’m talking about here. But just briefly, touch on, I think the online marketing piece is growing more and more important as time goes on. I found online marketing to be particularly helpful in larger cities.

[00:17:00] On the flip side, if you live in a smaller town, I think it can be a lot easier to do face-to-face marketing and build relationships over time. The likelihood is that there are going to be fewer people doing testing. So you might be able to gain some traction a little quicker. I found that with the folks I consult with who live in larger cities, online marketing becomes more and more important. 

When I say online marketing, one of the first things that comes to mind is your website. Your website doesn’t just inherently do marketing on its own, but it forms the bedrock of any marketing effort you might put out there because any marketing effort you do online is going to come back to your website. If you have a website that sucks, you’re not going to probably convert any people who click on your online ads or otherwise find you online.

[00:18:00] So I always go back to that website as a bedrock for your online marketing efforts. What that means is writing your website and designing your website in such a way that it puts testing front and center.

When I do website reviews for my consulting clients, I talk with them a lot about, one, I run into a lot of folks who don’t have testing front and center. And what I mean by that is that if you’re a testing person and you’re trying to put that forward as a primary service in your practice, it should be immediately visible on your homepage, and very clear that that’s something that you do in your practice and something that is a specialty. So that gets into website design, of course, and how you put information out there, but whatever it takes, that’s something that you have to do. You have to put testing front and center so that someone knows within [00:19:00] three seconds of going to your website that you do testing.

The other piece of getting your website in good shape is to make sure that you have a good copy. This is related to the first point that I made that you have to have a… I would have at least one specific page set out for testing services. If you want to do even better, I would separate your testing services into different pages.

So you can have single pages for ADHD testing, autism testing, dementia testing, Alzheimer’s, and learning disorder testing. You can separate all of those into different pages and each of those is going to help you when people come to look for services and testing services. And what that communicates is, Hey, this is something that’s really important. I’ve chosen [00:20:00] to put the time into it to specify all these different types of testing that I do. So making sure the copy is good and that encompasses everything from grammar, punctuation, layout, design, all of that kind of stuff.

There are plenty of people out there who can help you with copywriting on your website. You may even have friends or family who are skilled at that but certainly pay attention to your copy.

Now, the website also gets into branding. I think there’s probably a lot to be said for branding as a testing practice. I’m admittedly not an expert on branding and brand design and that kind of thing. I would love to get someone on the podcast to talk more specifically about that, but what that means is that from your colors to your logo, to your fonts, to your copy.

Everything that you put forward on your website should jive with your [00:21:00] testing services to make sure that everything is consistent. So someone doesn’t come to your website and it says counseling experts or something like that, or EMDR treatment. Those things are great, but you want to make sure that your branding reflects that you’re a testing psychologist as well.

This came up for me in an interesting way in that, I think I’ve mentioned on the podcast that my wife is also a therapist. Her branding for her practice is very different than the branding for our practice. She is more of a spiritual, depth-based counselor. She’s doing I think as far away from the medical models as you could possibly be.

The way that she presents herself on her website is vastly different [00:22:00] than the way that I present our practice, which does go along a little bit more with the medical model and diagnosis and empirically based treatment, things like that. So just pay attention to your branding as well.

The other piece about your website… As I’m talking about all this, I’m like, I need to have a website expert, but these are things I’ve learned over the years from talking with folks who do websites.

One of the other pieces is that you want to make sure that your website guides people in the right direction. I think of it like we have to walk our readers or our website visitors through the behavioral chain that you want them to take so that they will eventually end up calling your practice for an appointment. So what I mean by that is you need to have at least one or two [00:23:00] buttons right on the homepage that says book an appointment now, or call us now, or start your assessment today, something that makes it very clear exactly what that person needs to do if they want to make an appointment, because these days, there’s a lot of research around people spending very little time on webpages, and if they can’t find exactly what they need to do within 3 to 5 seconds then they jump somewhere else. So make sure you have buttons right on your homepage for them to schedule or call, if that’s what you’d like them to do.

Beyond that, there’s a progression, I think of what we generally want our clients to do. Typically, they come to the homepage. We want again, to have it right front and center that testing is a big part of the practice. So then you want them to maybe read a little bit about testing and then maybe click a learn more button. So they go to learn [00:24:00] more. That goes to a specific page just about testing. Maybe it details all the different types of testing you do. Maybe it talks about fees. Maybe it talks about typically who schedules testing what you can get out of testing, and pieces like that.

And then at the bottom of that page or in the middle of that page somewhere, you want to have another button that says Call us now to schedule your appointment, or email us here to ask any questions about testing. So again, it’s walking the person through what they should do on your website to take those steps to schedule an appointment.

There’s a lot to be said on websites. I’m going to stop there. But hopefully, you get the idea that websites are important.

Now, the actual elements of online advertising or marketing are search engine optimization. This is not exactly [00:25:00] marketing, but search engine optimization is the whole process of how you and perhaps your designer, your website person engineer your website so that it is found when people search in Google.

I think a lot of us make the mistake of putting a lot of time and effort into designing the actual look of the website and making it pretty when ultimately I think I would take just a functional, good, clean-looking website over a fancy website with a lot of bells and whistles as long as that clean, functional website can be found in Google.

I talk a lot with people who I consult with about putting money not necessarily into the design so much as the search engine optimization and making sure that your pages are written in a way that Google likes, that your keywords are all set up, and so forth so that when [00:26:00] people search testing for ADHD in Boston, you have a better chance of ranking to that first page of Google.

Again, there’s quite a bit of research around people not moving past the first page. If you’re not on the first page or maybe on the second page, the likelihood is that they’re going to click somewhere else. So that’s search engine optimization.

And then we get into actual paid advertising. Google AdWords is one form of paid advertising. I think it works well for folks who are searching for someone to do testing, especially in larger cities.

AdWords are those ads that pop up at generally the top of a Google search. They’ve made them less obtrusive lately, but if you search for a service in your town, like Plumber Boston or something, you will likely see that there are a [00:27:00] couple listings up at the top of the page that say ad in small font. That’s AdWords.

AdWords is a paid service. Typically, you contract with someone, a professional who’s an AdWords pro who can write the ads for you and make sure that they’re performing correctly. It’s called pay-per-click advertising. The idea is that you write these ads so that individuals who are searching for certain keywords will find your ad when they search on those keywords, and then you pay for every time someone clicks on your ad. Budgeting for this certainly varies. I know a lot of folks who will spend between $200 and $400 a month for AdWords and they have a lot of success with that. AdWords is a [00:28:00] science unto itself.

I can’t remember if I’ve told the story on here about how I lost a lot of money with both AdWords and Facebook ads. This is the downfall of being too independent and thinking I can do everything on my own. I’ve learned a lot over the years.

Back in the beginning, I set up what I thought were pretty good AdWords and Facebook ads, put in my credit card info, and hit submit. Those ads got a lot of clicks and I paid a lot of money. I thought I was doing well until I realized that I didn’t have any idea how to track who was clicking, where they were going, or if they were calling based on that ad or what. So I highly recommend if you’re going to do AdWords, or Facebook ads, which I’ll talk about in a second, [00:29:00] make sure you know what you’re doing or hire someone to do it for you, or you can lose a lot of money pretty quickly.

So, Facebook ads are another paid advertising means. I know that a lot of people do have success with Facebook ads. My sense of Facebook ads though, is that they tend to work a lot better if you already have a pretty visible presence on Facebook for your practice. So maybe you have been building a Facebook business page and you have several likes from, well, this is important, likes from people in the community who are actually potential clients and not just likes from other therapists. I think that a mistake that we make with our business Facebook pages is we can’t solicit reviews, so a lot of people end up getting likes from other therapists, but then other therapists are the only ones that see your content and you ideally would be putting [00:30:00] it out in front of potential clients.

So like I said, I think Facebook ads can work well if you already have a presence and you know how to target individuals who are your target clients. Again, Facebook ads, I think they’re a science unto themselves and there are plenty of people out there who can do them well, but that is another pay-per-click method of online advertising that you could pursue.

So that’s my short little roundup of online advertising. I want to move, at this point, to talk about two other random marketing ideas that aren’t exactly marketing, but they’ve worked pretty well for our practice.

The first one, you’ve heard me talk about, is writing a good report. I’m not going to say much about that because I’ve talked about it a lot but write a good report. Go back, listen to the [00:31:00] episode, I think it was 38 from Dr. Donders about how to write a good report and make it useful because that product is going to live forever in many people’s hands, parents, adults, therapists, pediatricians, physicians, schools, those reports go everywhere. So, make sure you’re editing your reports. They have good content. They’re useful. They’re helpful. They are well punctuated and well proofread. Write a good report.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was following up on referrals with a thank you fax. We put this into place probably 3 years ago, maybe more. And what this is, is, every time I get a referral from anyone, anything besides a self-referral, I ask for that information on the demographic [00:32:00] form, and I also get a release to send a thank you fax to that person. It’s very quick. There is no content to it really at all. It’s just a face sheet or cover sheet for the fax. We have a template and it just goes out to all those referral sources right after the initial interview, and it just says, “Thank you for sending patient’s name to our practice for an assessment. We will be in touch with any important updates and touch base if we need anything from you. We appreciate it.” And that’s it.

That sheet goes out to every single referral source and it has made a huge difference. I’ve heard from so many physicians and other therapists that not many people get in touch. They never hear after they send a referral and that it’s just really nice to have that point of [00:33:00] contact. So that’s one small thing that you can do. It does not take much time at all.

The other thing that I would call indirect marketing is making sure you always touch base with other treating providers. So if you get a referral from a therapist or a physician or a psychiatrist or a neurologist or anyone else in the community, an occupational therapist, speech therapist, tutor, I mean, any of those folks, I always talk with my clients or my parents about who else is working with their kid? Who’s working with their family? Is there anybody else that would be good for me to talk with to get more information for this evaluation? So it goes both ways. It worked well for the parents or the client because they know that you are taking care of them by gathering all these different sources of information. So that’s appreciated.

But then on the flip side, you get to connect [00:34:00] with a very valid reason, again, great for introverts who might not know otherwise how to connect. You get to connect for a very valid reason with all these other folks in the community. The hope, of course, is that through those conversations you might show your knowledge, and come across as a kind, funny, interesting person, whatever adjective you think describes you and your qualities will shine through and people will connect with you. And so there’s that whole thing of getting referrals from people that you know, like, and trust. I think talking with other providers is a great way to facilitate some of that.

That is what I would call my marketing roundup. We’ve talked about a lot of different things today. It was very quick granted, and I think there are a lot of topics that we can [00:35:00] dive into in more detail. But again, here at the beginning of the year, I know a lot of you are probably going through thinking about your business plan, your marketing plan, and what you might want to do differently. I don’t know if that’s a resolution of some sort, but hopefully, you’re able to take some of this info and take a few ideas and think, okay, yeah, I could tweak that a little bit, or I need to add that, or maybe I’ll try this next week. That’s the idea here.

Thank you as always for listening. Like I said, it’s awesome to be back doing the podcast, even though it’s only 2 or 3 weeks away, but I love it. It’s great to see the Facebook community continue to grow. If you’re not a part of the Facebook community, please search for us on Facebook at The Testing Psychologist Community and join our discussion.

Let’s see, coming up like I said, I have some really good interviews coming up [00:36:00] talking about evaluation of sex offenders and forensic evals, talking about testing accommodations for students based on current research. What else? We’re going to be talking about bariatric evals. So, if you do not want to miss any of those, take 15, maybe 30 seconds, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. That’s a great way to make sure that you don’t miss any of the content that comes out in the future.

All right, y’all. Take care. I’m looking out the window. It is super snowy here in Colorado and I am going to be bundling up to head home. So hope you’re all doing well wherever you’re at. Hope it’s warm and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye bye.[00:37:00]

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[00:00:00] Hey y’all, Happy New Year! This is Jeremy Sharp. This is The Testing Psychologist Podcast episode 41.

Hey, before we get going, I want to give one last shout-out to Practice Solutions as our podcast sponsor. They have been our sponsor for the past two months and it has been fantastic. I know that a lot of folks have already given them a call to check out their billing services. They do pretty much everything. They do insurance verification. They submit claims. They process payments. They track down payments. They send statements. They do pretty much everything.

If you are making your financial plan for the new year and trying to get things in shape for your practice, I would strongly consider Practice Solutions. They have a very reasonable fee and they are fantastic to deal with. You can get a discount off your first month’s services if you go to practicesol.com/jeremy.

All right. On to the podcast.

[00:01:10] Hey y’all, welcome back to another episode of The Testing Psychologist podcast. In fact, welcome to our last episode of 2017. I can’t believe that we are here. My gosh. I was talking with a friend this morning about how it seems like January 1st has come a little earlier this year than usual for whatever reason. I know for me this year has just flown by.

As I was sitting down to record this last podcast, I think that was extra apparent because I started the podcast almost exactly a year ago. I think the first episode came out on January 22nd, 2017. I was certainly planning and recording a lot of those episodes before that. So this time of year [00:02:00] was really meaningful for me as far as the podcast goes because it marks a little bit of a landmark.

When I started all of this, I had no idea where it was going to go. All I knew is that I felt passionate about teaching, sharing knowledge, and trying to help other folks learn how to put testing in business and build a practice around testing. I didn’t know where it was going to go. Luckily, I had a lot of encouragement from my coach, Joe Sanok, at that time, and a lot of other colleagues, family, and friends. It’s been an incredible ride to be able to bring all of this to you over the past year.

At this point, we have some statistics on The Testing Psychologist Podcast and Community. The podcast, this will [00:03:00] be episode 41, which is fantastic. The perfectionist in me would love for it to be closer to 52 because that would mean an episode every week, but I will take it. 41 is pretty good.

Let’s see. We have 538 members in The Testing Psychologist Community on Facebook. That has been incredible to watch that group grow. I’m amazed every day when I see posts in the group. I sit back and think, oh my gosh, I remember when there were just 20 of my psychologist friends to start out the group. It’s continued to grow and the discussion is so awesome to see people talking about the business of testing, different measures they like, and things like that.

So we have 538 members in The Testing Psychologist Community. The podcast itself has nearly [00:04:00] 15,000 downloads at this point. It’s been downloaded in over 20 different countries. We have folks from all over the world listening to the podcast and part of the Facebook group. It’s been awesome.

First and foremost, thank you all for joining me on this journey over the last year or so and walking along with me as I’ve gotten to pursue a passion of mine. It’s been so nice to see others get on board and find some of this helpful. So thank you all.

To end the podcast year, I thought that I would do a 2017 year-in-review. For this year in view, I was thinking, okay, what would be helpful and interesting with this? And so, I thought that I would pick the top 3 Most downloaded podcasts, go back and touch on [00:05:00] some points from those podcasts, and then I’ll throw in a couple of things that I thought were pretty interesting from random podcasts over the course of the year for myself.

Without further ado, here are our top 3 downloaded podcasts.

Number one, Episode #26 with Dr. Karen Postal. For those of you who have been longtime subscribers to the podcast, this probably doesn’t come as a surprise. Dr. Karen Postal is one of the preeminent neuropsychologists here in the country. She’s the current president of the AACN and she’s been very active in the publishing world as well.

What I talked with Dr. Postal about was her, I think most recent book, I’m trying to think, does she have any other book? I don’t think she has other books. She’s done other articles, but her most recent book, Feedback that Sticks, is [00:06:00] what we ended up talking a lot about.

Karen shared so many awesome nuggets of information around how to do a good feedback session during this episode. I think people got a lot out of it. She talked with us about the four key components of a good feedback session. She talked about some mistakes that people often make in a feedback session. One of those is spending way too much time on the data and not enough time on explanations, recommendations, and answering questions for people.

She talked about how to manage difficult feedback. And the way that she suggested that you go about that is she does a best-case, worst-case scenario. I think is very direct and we’ll say things like I know this could be hard to hear. Let me [00:07:00] give you a best-case scenario for 5 or 10 years down the road and I’ll give you a worst-case scenario for 5 or 10 years down the road. We can talk all about what exists at both ends of the spectrum and what might happen in the middle.

Karen also talked about the importance of providing, this is something that stuck with me, she talked about the importance of providing a grieving period during the feedback session for parents or family members who might be hearing something about their child or about their parent that is hard to hear. Sometimes as psychologists, even testing psychologists, we have to be able to provide space for them to grieve, whatever it is they may have been hoping for, the life they may have been hoping for that family member, and just be there with them. And again, do not get stuck in the data.

So this was a cool episode. Karen also talked about the importance of improv [00:08:00] classes because one of the main rules for any of you out there who have done improv, you probably know one of the main rules is that you always say yes. So you take whatever suggestion is thrown out on stage and you roll with it.

Karen put that in context for a feedback session because she was of the mind that as parents or family members may throw out ideas or ask questions or offer opinions during the feedback session, we can get a lot out of just saying yes, finding a way to get on board with what they’re saying or what they’re presenting or how they’re feeling and using that to integrate with the data that we have. Staying on board with people and sticking beside them throughout the feedback process is important.

So if you did not listen to episode #26, I highly recommend you go back and check it out. There was a link to [00:09:00] Karen’s book in the show notes and it’s a fantastic book. I’ve heard from several people actually who went and bought the book after the episode and said, Oh my gosh, this is great. 

The premise of the book, I should probably have said this right off the bat, for those of you who don’t know is that she interviewed neuropsychologists and psychologists all over the country, children, adults, different focuses. She asked them several questions about how they conduct their feedback sessions from length to format to who’s in the room to what they say to the language they use. It’s a really good book. So if you have not checked that out, I would recommend it.

All right. Number two, highest downloaded testing psychologist podcast episode, episode #19 with Dr. Aimee Yermish on Assessment for gifted and [00:10:00] intellectually advanced individuals. This was another rich episode. I think it still stands as our longest episode. I think we clocked in maybe an hour and a half. A big part of that was because Aimee had so much good information to share with us.

A few things that I wrote down that stuck with me from the episode with Aimee in addition to the specifics that she talked about in terms of measures to use and how to approach gifted evaluations, and she gave us a lot of resources for gifted children, things like that, but one of the things that I took away from that is that she frames giftedness as a cultural experience of sorts and talked about the fact that it is important for practitioners to be [00:11:00] culturally competent with gifted individuals just like we’re culturally competent with any number of other identities. That was interesting to me. I never heard it framed that way, but when she threw that out there, it made a lot of sense.

Aimee, in the episode, does talk about some ways to become more culturally competent with gifted individuals, but just the introduction of the idea that this is a competency that we should have is I think very valuable.

Another thing that Aimee talked about was when we do feedback sessions with more gifted kids and their parents, their parents tend to be gifted as well, right? There’s a big heritability to IQ. We often end up in the room with pretty bright parents. And so for those individuals, and in Aimee’s practice, she tends to do longer feedback sessions and more [00:12:00] detailed reports.

It’s interesting. It’s I think nice contrast to what Karen Postal might say, but for those parents, Aimee spends a little bit more time in the data and will entertain questions around statistics, and standard deviation, and dive into some of those more nuanced aspects of the report for parents of gifted kids because those parents tend to have a lot of questions. They want to understand the nature of the testing, what it means, and how to make sense of it.

So, Aimee does longer feedback sessions and like I said, a lot more detailed reports so that gifted parents can fully get the nuance of the testing process and your thinking, your interpretation, summary, diagnosis, and all those different pieces that go into the report.

[00:13:00] Now, another piece that I took away that was a, Oh my gosh, light bulb kind of moment was that Aimee said something like, “Bright psychologists also have to do their own work around being bright or else that will come out as countertransference with our testing clients.” For me, I, again, had never really thought about intelligence as an identity and certainly not something that could come out as countertransference or come into the work with our clients, but when Aimee said that, it’s like, Oh my goodness, of course, it is.

So that is another little nugget that I took away from mine and Aimee’s podcast together.

Like I said, she spoke at length about testing with gifted individuals. I really can’t do it justice here in just this [00:14:00] 5-minute little span. So again, check it out. Go back. Episode #19 with Dr. Aimee Yermish was our number two most downloaded episode this year.

Now, our number three most downloaded episode of The Testing Psychologist podcast. This was episode #24 with Dr. Dustin Wahlstrom and James Henke. It was all about Q-interactive.

For those of you who for whatever reason, have not heard about Q-interactive, Q-interactive is a digital test administration platform. It’s owned and distributed by Pearson. This is a way of administering many tests on iPads. There are a lot of questions that come up in the Facebook community about gosh, how do I afford testing materials when I’m starting out? This comes up [00:15:00] all over the place. What I talked about with Dustin and James was in large part, how Q-interactive is a cost-effective solution for people starting out and even for folks who’ve been in practice for a while.

Like I said, Q-interactive is a digital test administration platform. They have access to many of the most common tests that we use. A lot of the Wechsler scale, the WAIS, the WISC, the WPSI, the WIMS, the WIAT, the NEPSY, and The Children’s Memory Scale. What else? The CELF is on there.

There are a ton of tests that you could administer through Q-interactive. It’s a really good way to get up and running without a huge outlay of cash because their pricing model is, basically you have to buy two iPads if you don’t already have them. At this point, [00:16:00] I think you’re out $700 if you buy two brand-new iPads. Then beyond that, you have a yearly license which grants you a year of access to Q-interactive tests. I believe that’s about $250. It varies depending on how many tests you get. And then you pay by the subtest.

So this is a great solution. You can get away for under $1000 to get started compared to if you bought all of those testing batteries independently, you’d be looking at at least probably $7,000, maybe $10, 000 for all those test kits. So, it’s an easy way to get into testing, and then you pay based on what you use.

So if you’re just starting out, if you want to get your feet wet, if you aren’t sure if you want to make testing a huge priority in your practice, this is a great way to do it. And even for established practice owners, it’s, I think, really valuable. The last [00:17:00] test that we bought, the WPSI, I opted for Q-interactive instead of buying the full kit and it’s been great.

In this episode though, we talk all about how Q-interactive came to be. We do get into a little bit of the development, the standardization, and research equivalency between Q-interactive and paper and pencil tests and that sort of thing. We talk a lot about the cost and how that can save you some money. We do talk a little bit about what might keep you from using Q-interactive and who it might not be for. And then we also discuss future directions for the platform and what else is coming.

These guys are kind. They’re knowledgeable. They both have been working with Q-interactive for I think going on six years now. They’ve been in those positions. And so they are super knowledgeable.

If you are someone who [00:18:00] is thinking about jumping into testing or private practice and are worried about the cost, I would highly recommend that you listen to this episode and start to get some sense of what Q-interactive is all about. I think this is good.

There’s a nice coincidence happening here too because I’ve held off on any announcement about this, but things are looking like they’re going to be finalized very soon where testing psychologist listeners and testing psychologist community members on Facebook will have access to a deal of sorts from Q-interactive. I’ve been working out the details to nail down a deal with them to provide some benefits to our listeners and Facebook community members. So, look for that very soon.

If you’re not in the Facebook community, this is a great [00:19:00] time to jump in. If you have not subscribed to the podcast, this is a great time to do that as well, because I can guarantee that the first announcements and the first people to know about the Q-interactive deal will be on the podcast and in the Facebook group. So take a couple of seconds and search for us on Facebook. It’s called The Testing Psychologist Community. Likewise, if you have 15 or 20 seconds, just jump into the iTunes podcast store or Google Play or wherever you’re getting the podcast and do me a favor and subscribe to the podcast. That’s a great way to show support and make sure that I continue to have some leverage to talk with these companies and bring these kinds of deals to you.

Those were our top three most downloaded episodes. Again, #26, All about feedback with Dr. Karen Postal, #19, All about gifted assessment with [00:20:00] Dr. Aimee Yermish, and #24 with Dustin Wahlstrom and James Henke, All about Q-interactive.

Now, I said that I have two personal favorites that jumped out as I was looking back over the podcasts that I’ve done and I wanted to mention those too.

One of those was episode…, I don’t have it right in front of me, so I’m going to stumble just a little bit here. Let’s see, episode #16 with Kelly Higdon. This is really interesting. When I interviewed Kelly for episode #16, I knew of her through Joe Sanok who’s with Practice of the Practice and who was my personal coach for many months. So I knew of her and Kelly was really kind. She was really kind. She did a great podcast. We [00:21:00] talked all about building your perfect practice.

Kelly is like a walking embodiment of building a lifestyle practice. She completely gave up her therapeutic practice, which she maintained for many years. She walked away from that basically to focus completely on an online coaching business that would bring her the lifestyle that she was looking for.

She runs zynnyme.com. They do a business school boot camp. She also does individual coaching at kellyhigdon.com, but she talked on our podcast on episode #16 about building your perfect practice, and like she does, as I found out over the subsequent months as I got to know her better, Kelly gets to it.

One question that came [00:22:00] up as we were doing the podcast is, I was talking about how all of us, well, a lot of us anyway, don’t like writing reports. She asked, “Well, I would have to put it out there and ask, why do all of you do this thing that you dislike so much? Why are you choosing an aspect or a modality of practice that requires you to do something that you don’t like?” That was like a slap across the face. I thought that’s a great question, Kelly.

So if you listened to that episode and missed it, or if you haven’t heard it and are hearing it here for the first time, I think that’s a great thing to be thinking about. It expands to any other aspect of your practice. Why are you doing anything that you don’t want to do? And if you are, let’s find a way to change it. And if you want to do things differently, [00:23:00] let’s talk about how that might happen.

Kelly is a big proponent of creating the practice that fits your lifestyle, whether that’s financial, whether that’s a schedule that you want to keep, whether that’s a certain number of clients. So if that is interesting at all to you and you haven’t heard it, I would go back and check out episode #16 with Kelly Higdon.

Now, the other episode that jumped out to me was one that was pretty early on. This was episode #10 with Dr. Megan Warner. Megan and I talked about therapeutic assessment. This episode was pretty high up in the download list. It was definitely in the top 10. The material was really good.

Megan talked all about therapeutic assessment, which is a modality or approach, I suppose, about [00:24:00] how to do testing in a way that is collaborative, that takes the client’s well-being into account. It really does away with that medical model approach. She integrates personality assessment in particular into her therapeutic practice. And so she talks all about what measures to use, she’s a big fan of the PAI, and how she might integrate personality assessment with her therapy clients and how to market something like that out in your community. All of that is super valuable.

Megan studied with Les Morey, who was one of the authors of the PAI. So she has a ton of knowledge and she’s so well-spoken about these things. So I would recommend that you go listen to the episode if you have any interest in doing a little more, I would say light assessment, that is not a full cognitive battery. She was great.

Beyond the knowledge that jumped out, [00:25:00] Megan and I, I think had a nice rapport. She comes across as a very genuine, well-meaning, and easy to talk to individual. So much so that, this is a funny story from that podcast, after that podcast came out, I got feedback from several individuals about how they either wished Megan was their friend or they thought that Megan was the nicest person. That came in several forms.

The funniest example was probably my own mom who listens to all of my podcasts, of course, which is embarrassing and funny in and of itself, but she texted me after the podcast and said something like, “That Megan Warner is so nice. She is just such a good person.” The fact that my mom picked up on that and was [00:26:00] texting me about Megan stuck in my mind.

Anyway, Megan and I have maintained contact over the months and she’s just a fantastic person, but that is one that jumped out to me as well.

It’s hard to capture everything. We’ve done 40 episodes. There’ve been a number of tremendous guests. I feel so fortunate to have been able to speak with all of these individuals and gain so much knowledge myself just from being on the mic with each of these folks and being able to talk about their areas of expertise. So, it’s been great. It’s been an awesome year.

Thanks to all my guests. Thanks to all of you for listening. I’m really excited about the upcoming year. I just continue to work on moving things around in my schedule so that I can dedicate more and more time to the podcast. We have some great guests coming [00:27:00] up. 

If you have not subscribed to the podcast, I would invite you to do that. I’d love to have you as a regular listener. And like I said, that’s the best way to show support and I can turn that support into nice deals and advantages with testing companies, other resources, and providers of other services and things like that. So if you haven’t subscribed, please do so. If you haven’t joined us in The Testing Psychologist Community, you are very much invited to do that. We’re on Facebook.

And if you are interested in consulting, please give me a shout. You can find out more about consulting and what that looks like at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. I would love to talk with you. If it’s not right for you, that’s totally okay. If it is, I’d love to work with you.

[00:28:00] Thanks again. This is awesome. Hope you have a great New Year’s, great holiday season, and I will catch y’all in 2018.

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[00:00:00] Hello, and happy holidays to everybody. This is The Testing Psychologist Podcast episode 40. I’m Dr. Jeremy Sharp.

Before we get started today, I want to give a quick shout-out to our sponsor Practice Solutions. You’ve heard me talk about them before. They’re a full-service mental health billing company They do it all. They do everything from claim submission to sending statements, to collecting payment to collections, and they will help you with all aspects of billing. We’ve been working with them for the past few months, and we are noticing, it looks like about a 30% increase in collections from before we started working with them.

So if you’re interested in a billing company, I recommend you give them a call. You can do a free consultation and see if they might be a good fit for you. If you go to practicesol.com/jeremy, you can get a discount on your first month’s services as well.

All right. Now, onto the podcast.

Hey y’all, welcome back to another episode of The Testing Psychologist podcast. I am Jeremy Sharp. Happy holidays to everybody out there. Hope that you are maybe getting some time off. Let’s see, as this episode is released, we’ll be getting pretty close to Christmas time. So, hope you are all doing well and enjoying the holiday season so far.

I feel like this time from Thanksgiving to New Year’s just flies by. It’s like I blink and then all of a sudden we’re in January. We’re right in the midst of that. I don’t know about y’all either, but our practice is hectic here at the end of the year as people are trying to get in end of the semester [00:02:00] and maybe grades weren’t quite as good as they were hoping and also trying to get their deductibles met, or sorry, they have their deductibles met and they’re trying to get services before the deductible resets.

Either way, things have been hectic. But that is all good. My reframe here lately, I got tired of saying that I’m busy. I feel like I was just saying I was busy for a long time. So my reframe is that now I say I am getting the opportunity to help lots of people on days that are particularly busy. So that’s where I’m at.

Today, I wanted to talk with you about a few different things. Just a few little tips and things that I’m going to be working on here over the holidays.

I tend to take about two weeks off over the holidays, usually the week of Christmas and the week of New Year’s. Sometimes that’s more aspirational than others, but the idea is that I [00:03:00] block off two weeks to catch up. Usually, by the time I get where I am right now, here at the end of the year, I’ve maybe gotten behind on reports or there’ve been things that have been left over from the practice and there are some loose ends to tie up. So I am taking two weeks off and I wanted to talk with y’all about how to maybe utilize that time.

My hope is that each of you might be able to take some time off during this holiday season as well. So hopefully you have a little bit of time away from clients. You might be able to block out a few good chunks of time to work on some other things in your practice.

I tend to do this about twice a year where I go back, revisit, revamp things, take a look at everything, and make sure that everything’s running smoothly. Christmas is one of those times and [00:04:00] sometime during the summer, usually June or July, I will do this as well. So, hopefully, you have the opportunity to do this too.

If you are sitting at your computer or you happen to be in front of your schedule, it might be a good time to check and see, do you have two days where you could maybe block out 3 to 4 hours on each day just to look at your practice and try to make some things more efficient and tune things up a little bit because I’m going to give you three quick things that you can look at to move in that direction.

The first thing that I am going to be doing here over the break is taking a good look at my report templates. You may have heard the podcast two episodes ago with Dr. Jacobus Donders, he wrote a book called Neuropsychological Report Writing, and we talked a lot about how to write efficient reports that were useful and not too long.

[00:05:00] I got a lot of feedback from that episode about how… I think he said that he writes his reports in about 20 minutes not including thinking time, but he dictates reports in about 20 minutes and they end up being 3 to 4 pages long. A lot of you had an, Oh my gosh reaction. It has sparked a lot of discussion too about how to make our report shorter, more efficient, and more helpful.

Taking that as a springboard, I’m going to be looking at my report template to make sure that I have tightened everything up, and maybe you could do the same. I’ll start at the top and try to look at it with completely fresh eyes. So I look at the header, I’d say, is all that information necessary? Is it clear? Is it exactly what the reader wants or needs? And then move from there down through your various sections. So [00:06:00] taking a critical eye and saying to yourself is this material needed?

Now, some things that got brought up in the prior podcast that might get cut out are rewriting history a little bit so that you are only including information that is relevant and not just regurgitating info that everybody should probably already be aware of. So cutting down your your background and history. I’m giving serious thought to maybe even eliminating the results section entirely and just letting the score tables speak for themselves at the end of the report, and jumping straight to the clinical impressions and recommendations.

Now, in those recommendations, you can make sure that you are tying everything together succinctly, but also in a very helpful way. So you’re not again, repeating information that’s already present in the report.[00:07:00] You’re also not repeating information that other people already know. The interpretation should be a section where you’re offering new information. You tie everything together from the testing, and then you relate that directly to recommendations.

Speaking of recommendations, that is the second thing that I’m going to be looking at. We’ve talked here on the podcast before about trying to have a recommendation bank, and hopefully, you are all building your recommendation banks so that you are not reinventing the wheel with every report you write. If not, this is a gentle reminder to start to develop a recommendation bank that you can pull from and insert into your reports as you go along.

I’m going to be diving into our recommendation bank and going through each one with a fine toothcomb, fine-tuning the wording, making sure [00:08:00] that the recommendations are helpful, clear, not written with any jargon, and also supported by research. This is one of the times during the year when I’ll go back through and look up a few newer articles and look up any books or other resources that might’ve been published in the last year, just to make sure that the recommendations I am offering are on point. This is something also, I think that helps keep our report writing fresh and makes it a little bit easier.

I talked with, I believe it was Kelly Higdon way back in episode, gosh, maybe 10 or 12 when she was talking about building an ideal practice. If you haven’t listened to that episode, it’s great. She talks a lot about lifestyle practice and making your practice exactly what you want. Part of that is we talked about how a lot of psychologists choose to do a lot of testing but they hate report writing.

And she asked the question, [00:09:00] “Well, why are you doing something that you hate so much of the time?” And one of the things that came out of that was figuring out that, for me, revamping the report periodically which includes recommendations, which includes report format is something that helps keep report writing fresh and keeps me interested and keeps me engaged.

So to go back and look at your recommendations and make sure that those are on point and they’re working for you and they’re working for the client is another thing to tune up here over the holidays. Again, this does not take a ton of time. If you have two hours set aside, you can probably roll through them pretty quickly.

Now, the third thing that I would recommend you check out is your, I would call it policies and procedures and paperwork. This is a time to go through, if you have employees or psychometricians [00:10:00] or anything like that, to go through and make sure that all of your disclosure statements accurately reflect those individuals’ credentials, supervision requirements, and things like that.

I always like to go through our paperwork again, to make sure that all of the wording is intact. Maybe some of you have put off putting together a supplemental billing agreement. I know we’ve talked a lot in the Facebook group lately about whether you can charge insurance clients the balance of your testing if the testing is not covered by insurance. So that is one form that you might want to put together if you take insurance.

If you don’t take insurance, now’s a good time to go through and make sure that your forms accurately reflect your testing process and that you have everything you need in place to make sure that people know what to expect.

[00:11:00] I would also include fees in this discussion. I think January, the first of the year is a great time to go back and say, am I charging enough? So you can look at the market, you can look at your experience. You at this point have one more year’s worth of experience under your belt. So go back and check that out. Make sure that you are charging what you should be charging and update your paperwork to reflect that.

So those are going to be the main things that I am looking at over the next two weeks to make sure that the practice is in good shape to keep moving forward here, and maybe you have some other things in mind that you’re going to be looking at as well. But I think now is a good time to again, take the time and revamp a few things, and make sure that you’re good to go when you have a little bit of time off.

Now, if you have other things that you’re going to [00:12:00] be working on over the break, I would love to have you jump into our Facebook group and talk about it there and let everybody else know what sort of things you are doing to fine tune and make your practice more efficient. So if you’re not a member of the Facebook community, it’s called The Testing Psychologist Community. You can search for it on Facebook. We are over 500 members strong at this point. It’s awesome to see that community come together and see people sharing about the business stuff, the clinical side, asking about measures, things like that. So, we’d love to have you join us if you’re not in the Facebook group.

Before we take off, just going to give one more shout-out to Practice Solutions. Like I said at the beginning, they do it all in terms of billing. So if you are maybe making a resolution for this coming year to tighten up the finances in your practice, give Practice Solutions a call and see if they can help you. You can go to practicesol.com/jeremy [00:13:00] and if you sign up that way, or just tell them you heard about them through The Testing Psychologist, they will give you a discount on your first month services. Either way, you can give them a call, talk about whether it’d be a good fit, and then go from there. No pressure.

So thank you again, as always for listening. I think I’m going to be hitting you with another episode before Christmas, or I guess, it’ll come out on Christmas Day and then another on New Year’s Day. I hope the holidays go well for you. I will talk with you next time. Take care.

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[00:00:00] Dr. Sharp: Hey y’all, this is Dr. Jeremy Sharp, and this is The Testing Psychologist podcast, episode 39. Hey, before our episode gets started today, I have two things to share with you. One is that I am so excited to have Practice Solutions on board for one last month of sponsoring here before the year ends.

Practice Solutions is a full-service billing company that saves you tons of time doing a task that most of us don’t love to do. They do everything billing-related from benefits and coverage verification to processing payments, to sending out statements, to submitting insurance claims. They do it all.

They’re fantastic. They’re super responsive. Now that I have several months under my belt with them, I can confidently say that they have increased our collections at least 30% month over month compared to before we used them. So I wholeheartedly recommend them. You can get a discount off your first month services if you go to [00:01:00] www.practicesol.com/jeremy, or just tell them that you heard about them through The Testing Psychologist podcast.

The other thing I wanted to share with you is that today I have a fantastic interview with Dr. Cathy Lord, co-author of the ADOS and ADI-R to share with you. It was a great interview, but we had some tech issues. So the audio is a little less clear than usual, but I think you will still be able to get plenty of good information from this interview. With that said, enjoy.

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Testing Psychologist podcast. Today, I am absolutely [00:02:00] thrilled to be talking with Dr. Cathy Lord. You have likely heard Cathy’s name over the years. She’s a co-author for both the ADI-R and the ADOS, which have come to become some of the gold standards for autism spectrum assessment in our field.

So we’ll talk a lot about that and a number of other topics here as we go along with Cathy. Let me give a brief introduction and then we can jump into our conversation.

Dr. Cathy Lord is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and Founding Director of the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain, which is a collaboration between New York Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medicine, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and in New York Collaborates for Autism. She is a licensed clinical psychologist with obvious specialties in diagnosis and intervention in autism spectrum disorders.

[00:03:00] Like I said, she’s been renowned for her longitudinal work with kids with autism and in her role in developing these diagnostic measures that so many of us have used over the years and continue to use. She got her degrees at UCLA and Harvard. She did her internship at the TEACCH program at the University of North Carolina.

Cathy, I am honored to have you on the podcast. Welcome.

Dr. Cathy: It’s nice to be here.

Dr. Sharp: Thank you so much for taking the time to be here to chat with us. I think like myself, a lot of other folks will be excited to hear this. You’ve been around for a while and you’ve done some important things here in our field. So I am very excited to jump into it and start talking about your work with autism spectrum disorders and diagnostic measures.

Dr. Cathy: Great.

Dr. Sharp: It’s normal for us here on the podcast to check [00:04:00] in here at the beginning. I would love to hear about your training, but really, what you’re currently doing. It sounds like you’re involved with a lot of different agencies and a number of different projects. Can you catch me up on what you’re doing clinically and research-wise right now?

Dr. Cathy: Right now I am the Director of a clinic that sees people with autism from tiny babies all the way up to adults. We provide assessments, intervention and consultation. So we do a little bit of everything and not enough of anything as outpatients.

And then we do clinical research. So we are on the fringes of biological research in that we help the basic scientists describe their patients, but mostly what we do is our clinical things. Mostly our focus right now is on trying to improve the [00:05:00] measures we’ve done.

For example, we’re trying to come up with a better ADI, the parent interview. We’re trying to make it modular, so shorter. We’re trying to make it so that you can do it on an iPad. It’s still an interview, but you can enter it on an iPad. You can pick the kinds of questions you want to ask, you can perhaps ask them over and over again to be follow-up questions but it won’t be quite so onerous as the whole long thing that exists currently.

Our biggest focus is something called the BOSCC, which stands for Brief Observation of Social Communication Behavior, which is a 12-minute videotape observation that can be done by somebody pretty untrained, like a post-baccalaureate research assistant or also a parent interacting with a child. The idea is that you video it with somebody with minimal instructions. And [00:06:00] then you can code this.

Somebody with a minimal amount of training codes the child’s social behavior. The codes are laid out so that they’re much more sensitive to change than an ADOS. They’re more focused on frequency and not diagnostic. This is not a mini ADOS, this is looking for change.

We’re hoping that we’ll be able to get a measure that will be sensitive to things like a child’s change after say, three to six months of early intervention or three to six months of participation in a social group. That’s a big focus of what we’re doing.

We’ve finished the version for minimally verbal kids and are working away on a version for verbal kids. Right now, that’s primarily available for researchers, but we hope we can make it available to clinicians too, and maybe make available a service that would actually code these things so you could just [00:07:00] upload it and have somebody for a minimal cost, not super expensive, give you your codes back so that you can be blinded, because as clinicians, we are biased, we know we are, and so are parents seeing changes because partly we’re hoping to see them, and we’re just so invested, so they give you feedback. So that’s something we’re doing.

We’re also interested in trying to pick apart what changes and why in different interventions. With Sophie Kim, who is one of my colleagues, she just got a big grant to try to use this instrument to look at what changed in early intervention and why, and how that relates to parents’ behaviors. So that’s another project.

And then the last big thing we’re doing is continuing our longitudinal study which has been following about [00:08:00] 200 young people whom we met when they were two years of age, referred for possible autism, who are now in their mid-20s.

Obviously, we have not at all determined these young people’s lives. We’re just watching them, following them, hearing from their families and from them how their lives have gone. It’s been a wonderful way to get a natural history of what happens in the lives of these 200 young individuals and watch them grow up. So that’s the main way I spend my time now.

Dr. Sharp: Okay. It sounds like you’ve got a lot going on. You’re still very much on the front lines doing the research and developing these things.

Dr. Cathy: We are. There’s a lot more to do and we could keep doing. We could make things better. There’s a million ways we could make what we’ve done better. So it never stops.

[00:09:00] Dr. Sharp: Always. I think that’s familiar for anybody in research. You started off with some pretty hot topics right off the bat. When I hear you talk about putting the ADI-R on an iPad and shortening it, the light bulb goes off. I wanted to shout for joy. I feel like I have to ask, is that close at all to be able to roll that out?

Dr. Cathy: Two years, I think.

Dr. Sharp: Oh, okay.

Dr. Cathy: Sorry. It won’t be handing the parent the iPad. It’ll still be an interview because we feel like it’s important that someone asks the questions, but you’ll be able to rule the answers and code it on the iPad so the codes will come right back to you.

We still feel like we need the human clinician. I’m a real believer in human clinician. [00:10:00] It’ll be shorter and more to the point. There’ll be modules, so you’ll be, am I interested in a diagnosis? Do I already have a developmental history so I don’t need to spend a lot of time talking about toilet training? Am I worried about comorbidity, so I need to really talk about behavior problems or is that something someone else is going to do or I’ll do later?

And then the other thing is, is this a follow-up visit? Do I want to go through and talk about things that I’ve talked about before so I’m just focusing on current? And then being able to compare that quickly to what I got before.

We’re hoping that we can do all this with the help of an iPad or putting it right on your Mac or something so that there’s not all the craziness of filling out forms and then doing currents and evers and sorting all that out.

So we [00:11:00] hope quicker, more user-friendly, and more focused.

Dr. Sharp: I think that’s great. It seems like that’s the direction that we’re moving with assessment in general. So that’s great to hear that y’all are trying to move in that direction as well.

I would say for a lot of folks, anecdotally, the ADI-R and the length involved in the minutiae nuances of scoring are sometimes hurdles to administering the whole thing.

Dr. Cathy: Yeah. We know.

Dr. Sharp: I’m sure. You’ve lived it. Gosh, I just had like five thoughts at once from your little introduction, but I’m going to try to stay on script a little bit here. For anybody who doesn’t know, we’re casually throwing out ADOS and ADI-R and that kind of thing. Could you generally talk about what those instruments are [00:12:00] and what they’re trying to assess for anybody who might not know?

Dr. Cathy: Sure. The idea of the ADOS is to use the powers of a human clinician or to observe and interact with a person with autism in order to make a diagnosis, and to try to standardize that in a way that two trained, experienced clinicians who did this twice within a reasonable period of time would come up with the same diagnosis and the same scores so that we’re both having the benefit of both skilled and a human being, but also standards so that if I see scores, I know what they mean. I know [00:13:00] that it has a meaning for me, that it is the same for me and for you and for somebody who is in Sweden or Korea or Thailand or Australia.

And that has to be individualized to some degree because all people with autism are different. Also the context in which we behave. Part of the difficulty with autism is that a person may not be responsive to context. So we’re counting on the clinician to be aware of that.

Essentially, what the ADOS is, is a series of tasks that vary according to the age and the language level of an individual. There were different modules that you select from depending on age and language level. There’s about 10 tasks that you do over the course of about 45 minutes.

You have to learn to do [00:14:00] this and you have to practice. You present these tasks to a person that you think might have autism. As you present them, in a particular way, you are watching how the person with autism responds to you and also how they initiate with the materials. The materials are deliberately selected to provoke or evoke certain kinds of behaviors.

And then when you’re finished, you code what the person does, and this gives you a diagnostic algorithm that can be rated on severity. It’s not severity for life, it’s severity compared to other people of the same age and the same language level, how severe are that person’s symptoms in terms of social communication and repetitive behaviors in that 45 minutes? That’s what the ADOS does.

I think that the other main value of the ADOS is that for young children, the parents or caregivers are expected to be there. You can use them to participate. This is not why it was created, but I think that a tremendous value is parents can actually see what it is that you’re doing and understand what it is that you’re looking for in making a diagnosis, and be part of this in a positive way, because we’ve put positive experiences, pleasant experiences in there.

For older kids, I think the value is that there are deliberately situations that we hope aren’t misery creating, but are hard for many people with autism that they may be able to avoid often in other [00:16:00] circumstances, and that it does make you think about things that might be hard for somebody that you might not see otherwise. So it does give you these standardized scores for difficulty.

What the ADI-R is a very lengthy caregiver interview that a clinician gives. What’s different about it than other things is it’s relatively open-ended. It’s a semi-structured interview, which means that the clinician has a certain question that’s open-ended, but then you have codes and it’s up to the clinician to get enough information to answer that code.

Once you’ve asked the first question, it’s up to the clinician to keep probing till you can honestly check off one of the codes. So you can ask any other question that you need to [00:17:00] ask or get the person talking about, whatever you need to in order to reach those codes. So it’s very different than something like an SRS or a CBCL where you’re just filling out a form.

I think for me, the primary value for us in our clinic, we always try to get away from an ADI-R and then we end up coming back to it, is it gives parents a chance to tell us about their children. It gives us a chance to see the child through their parents’ eyes.

There are other ways to do that. I think people work out all kinds of ways of getting that information, but for us, especially in a training clinic, it’s been very helpful to start with that, particularly for families who are fairly well-informed and seeking a diagnosis.

It can be a great entry point for a clinician to get a sense of what is the family thinking about? What do they know about their child? What are they [00:18:00] worried about? And then go from there. It’s way too long and there’s a lot of things in it that don’t need to be there.

Dr. Sharp: That’s interesting to hear you say that. It sounds like y’all are working on that for sure. It’s a very useful tool either way.

I think over the years, between those two tools that you’ve helped develop, the ADI-R and ADOS, that term, gold standard for autism assessment really became commonplace, especially with the ADOS. It seemed like for a while, there was a lot of emphasis put on ADOS as the deciding factor in a diagnosis.

And now it seems like we’re going back the other direction. You’ve been an author on some of those papers to say, hey, this is maybe not the only thing to use, there are other tools. Am I right with that?

Dr. Cathy: I think there isn’t one answer [00:19:00] ever. What we’ve tried to do with the calibrated severity scores is say, there is a continuum and it’s important to use these scores like a blood pressure metric. You should compute it and say, where does this child fall and what does this mean? And then take that into account with other things.

At least in our clinic, and obviously we are so biased, because we talk about this all the time and we all do it. We trust our own judgment more than we trust almost anything else, which maybe we shouldn’t. I think that you’ve got to know what the child is like in other circumstances, you’ve got to know what they’re like at school and other circumstances. You also need to know from the parents and the [00:20:00] teachers.

We know that autism diagnoses that take into account information from a teacher or a parent and a clinician using something like an ADOS and an ADI-R or an SCQ or an SRS are going to be more diagnosis of stable and reliable than a diagnosis made just on one source. So that we know. Those probably make less difference.

Dr. Sharp: Oh, that’s interesting. I was going to ask, maybe you’ve already answered this but in your mind, what is the ideal suite of assessment tools when you’re looking at autism in kids? I know it varies depending on age and things like that, but in a kid, what else would you [00:21:00] recommend?

Dr. Cathy: I think you want something from a parent. Ideally, I would like something from a teacher, maybe not so much diagnostic but I would want to know from a teacher how they think the child is doing. I would want to know either the equivalent of the CBCL or a Vineland or something or input from the teacher. And then I probably would do an ADOS, but partly it’s because I’ve done so many ADOSes, they’re second nature to me, so it’s easy for me to slot in an individual child compared to other kids.

I think that for young kids, the STAT is very good. It’s just much more limited in terms of the age of the kids and you do get bigger age effects and language effects. The problem with these [00:22:00] instruments that are specific to particular ages is that if you have a very bright child or a child who has very minimal skills, you’re going to lose them either end.

And that’s been the value of the ADOS is it covers such a broad range by the time you have all the modules that you can move up and down easier. I think the STAT is also very good. So that’s another instrument that involves clinician observation.

The CFBS for the little kids is probably over-diagnostic of communication problems, but also a place where you observe the child. It’s focusing on communication. You can look at repetitive behaviors during it. It’s for very young kids as well.

Basically, though, you want an observation and then you want some kind of way of reporting from kids. The SRS people use it a lot. It makes me [00:23:00] nervous because the SRS is far more correlated with the CBCL and behavior problems than it is with social deficits. So you’ve got to be really careful. I think it means something’s wrong when you get a high on SRS, but it certainly doesn’t mean autism.

Dr. Sharp: I see what you mean. I think it’s a dilemma we get in.

Dr. Cathy: That’s the problem. People use it, but who knows. There’s a variety of other autism measures that I’m less familiar with, that a lot of people like a lot. I just shouldn’t comment because I don’t know.

Dr. Sharp: Sure. I think that’s the dilemma with the behavior checklist is that, at least in my experience with some colleagues, it’s been hard to find the right one. I’ve settled on the SRS in conjunction with these other methods we’re talking about, [00:24:00] but it’s tough, like the GARS and the CARS I’m a huge fan of, this has been tough to find the right checklist. It sounds like that’s not just me, maybe.

Dr. Cathy: Right.

Dr. Sharp: So an observation, an ADOS and certainly getting information from multiple sources, those are pretty important. And then you just have to be careful with the behavior checklist that you’re using and integrate that appropriately. Is that about right?

Dr. Cathy: Right. With the behavior checklist, so when you have like a CBCL, you’ve got to remember that the SRS and the CBCL are going to be more correlated with each other than they are with anything else because you have method variants that’s stronger than the kid. That’s where you have to be careful but it’s still better than not doing it.

[00:25:00] So get that and get an ADOS alongside of the not doing it, but it’s not the same thing as getting separate autism information. Just because it’s called the Social Responsiveness Scale does not mean it measures social responsiveness. It means that we didn’t want to call it the Autism Responsiveness Scale because that upsets parents. So you’ve got to be really careful.

I think that’s where you’ve got to be careful. The CARS was the original autism measure. It was the best thing around for a lot of people and it still works most of the time just because most of the kids who have the things on the CARS have autism, but it doesn’t really match up with what is in DSM-5 or what will be in ICD-11 at all.

It’s just fortuitous that it [00:26:00] describes autism symptoms. It just includes a lot of other things in there, like low IQ which many kids with autism but not most by any means, have.

Dr. Sharp: It is hard to separate and hard to find the one that is exactly right. I think that speaks to the variance in presentation with folks on the spectrum. That’s a good segue, I did want to ask you about how you see the ADOS fitting in with, and assessing that variation, particularly there’s the girl versus boy or male versus female question, and then there’s the higher functioning versus more lower functioning on the spectrum question.

I wonder if we could tackle that a little bit and how you see the ADOS, [00:27:00] particularly for higher functioning females, but it seems to maybe miss some folks on the spectrum. How do you work with that or do you have thoughts on that?

Dr. Cathy: I think that the role of sex differences in girls with autism is a real question that we just don’t understand. When you look at the data, they’re all over the place. There’s some data that suggests that we really are missing a lot of girls and other data that suggests that we aren’t.

I think part of the problem is that girls, like the boys, are so variable, and we all remember the girl that we missed. On a gut level, I do believe that girls are different than the boys.

One of the things I keep reminding myself is that at one point when I was younger, I was in [00:28:00] London, I was going through the records at the Institute of Psychiatry with Michael Rutter, 90% of the kids there had atypical autism diagnoses. Only 10% got regular autism diagnoses. Everybody that came to their clinic, they would say atypical autism.

My point is that it’s very seldom do we see a classically autistic child. We’re always saying, oh yeah, not quite classically autistic. I think we’ve got to remember that because when you get the idea in your head that somebody is going to be atypical, which is going around right now with the girls, you’re going to see that.

On the other hand, I think that the experience that girls have is different than boys. We know that girls are less hyperactive, girls are less aggressive, girls are less disruptive [00:29:00] and girls are less likely to be language-delayed than ordinary girls. All of those factors probably contribute to looking less autistic as an adjective, not as a diagnosis.

And then I think girls are socialized to be better behaved and so I think that contributes probably; both biological differences and social differences to being different. We have to be careful. I think that one of the things to try to remind people with the ADOS and ADI-R is there is flexibility in there. There’s a lot of stuff in the ADOS and you can also choose your examples, so don’t be rigid, choose your examples so they’re appropriate [00:30:00] to a girl.

Sometimes people say, oh this stuff is so geared toward boys, but it’s not, there is stuff in there for girls. Use it for goodness sake.

Dr. Sharp: Can I jump in and ask that?

Dr. Cathy: Do not do the same thing that you’ve just done with all those boys. Try to find the stuff in there that you think will appeal if you think this girl wants to do it. Not all the girls are dying to do girl stuff, but I think that you do have to remember that.

It’s certainly on the ADI-R, you can think of examples that might be more appropriate if you think that you’re pulling the wrong example because at this point, there isn’t evidence that we’re actually looking for something different in the girls. It’s just [00:31:00] that we may need to shift our expectations a little bit and provide different examples.

I do think the threshold may be different. I just saw a 13-and-a-half-year-old girl, she had a diagnosis of pretty much everything else under the sun than ASD. I think she has ASD and nobody saw it.

Dr. Sharp: What things did you see that others maybe didn’t catch or how did you pull those things out through the assessment?

Dr. Cathy: This is a young girl who is very nice-looking. She has a beautiful smile and otherwise, no facial expression, but she does have a beautiful smile. I think people saw that smile. She has pretty good eye contact, but she also has a visual problem so she doesn’t quite look at you right. She also has a [00:32:00] astigmatism so that’s part of it.

So I think people didn’t put that together. I think they didn’t catch that it’s actually quite hard to catch her eye. They always thought it’s because of the astigmatism. And then they didn’t even notice that with this lovely smile, otherwise, there’s nothing there.

She’s a very fine actress. When she is animated, she can she can re-enact Frozen for you. And then she gestures, she sings, but otherwise, she does not move her body, she does not gesture. In that sense, she does look classically autistic in terms of her nonverbal behavior.

I think people were so surprised, at a very early age, she started singing. That so [00:33:00] much overwhelmed people. Also, the fact that she had delayed motor skills, which is perhaps maybe more common in girls with autism than boys. We don’t know. And the visual problem, and her verbal skills, she’s always been very verbal. That’s not necessarily typical of girls with autism, so they just didn’t even think of autism.

And then when she started having terrible temper tantrums, everyone got so obsessed with that, they went off onto a whole other diagnostic route. And then I think what she’s rigid about is mental health. She’s obsessed about her own mental health and everyone else’s mental health, and then a little bit about social justice and various other issues which are not the [00:34:00] same as like being obsessed about flags or subways or ceiling fans.

Dr. Sharp: Sure, but still a restricted interest as far as you can tell.

Dr. Cathy: Yeah. If you counted up her references to social justice and the unfairness of buying $700 shoes, which is specific to Manhattan, that may be female in the sense that I don’t know how many boys would even know who bought $700 shoes.

Dr. Sharp: Sure. That’s a good question. That’s an interesting case that touches on the sex differences, but it also raises a question for me that during the ADOS, I often have a hard time picking up those repetitive behaviors, restricted [00:35:00] interests, particularly if they’re not obvious. I often end up with a bunch of zeros on that bottom half of the scoring rubric. I wonder, do you have thoughts on things to look for in that regard or ways to pick up more nuanced, repetitive behavior, particularly during the ADOS that people might be missing?

Dr. Cathy: That’s a really good question. She was a good example where I debated what to score there and ended up finally scoring that because I thought, in the end, there were just so many references. I had such a hard time getting her off that topic. I had to define it as a topic, which seemed a bit odd to me for me to define that as a topic.

I think that sometimes you are going to have zeros. We have to admit sometimes we [00:36:00] don’t know. I think that we are basically going back and forth realizing that in some cases, for example, in research, we’ve had young research assistants trained to do ADOSes, they come back, and every 10-year-old boy that they assess, whether they have autism or they’re typically developing, comes back and they say they have repetitive interests in video games.

You have to be careful to define what a repetitive interest is. On the other hand, here I am giving you an example where I’m struggling whether to call something a repetitive interest. It is pretty nuanced.

With odd behaviors, what we’ve ended up saying to people is if [00:37:00] you see something that looks odd, go ahead and score it because you’re not going to make someone autistic by having one odd behavior. They’ve got to have other things as well.

It should be odd in a way that’s clearly autistic. It shouldn’t be picking your fingernails or rubbing a table. It should be smelling something that no one else would smell or something very clearly autistic. Otherwise, we have to live with the fact that we can’t always catch things.

Sometimes we don’t see it and then literally, you’re walking someone to the waiting room, and out comes some clear example of something that you were trying desperately to get someone to tell you during an ADOS and they’re not doing it.

[00:38:00] Dr. Sharp: So what do you do with that situation? I’m curious because I think we’ve all had that, like the ADOS goes pretty well, but then there’s something in the waiting room or something during the other portions of testing, and you’re like, oh, if I could just score that as part of the ADOS, how do you work into that?

Dr. Cathy: I don’t score it in the ADOS but I still trust my judgment. I would just overrule the ADOS. What I do is write up the ADOS, I say what I saw but I’m wishy-washy about what it means. And then I say what I really think.

I would write up the ADOS probably emphasizing the aspects that made me suspicious but you can’t put it in the ADOS, because the ADOS is a measurement. You can’t put it in that [00:39:00] measurement. You’re stuck but you can in your clinical formulation. You can say, the ADOS gave me this information and then you don’t have to put the negative information.

The ADOS gave me this information, my clinical observation gave me this information, this is my decision. Ultimately, it is your decision. One caveat I would stick in here is that we have seen a number of very small kids who’ve had high ADOS scores where clinicians could not bring themselves, I’m talking about two year olds, to say they had ASD. There I would be really careful not to rule it out.

I would be careful because those kids often get in the denied services, and when we see them often they do have ASD because they get worse. So there are lots of groups where [00:40:00] if you get a middling high ADOS score, I would be tempted to be really careful not to deny a kid services if it’s going to be dependent on an ADOS.

Dr. Sharp: Can I put you on the spot a little bit? I agree with that, absolutely. I wonder about the wording and how you might phrase that to parents because I feel like parents come in for these evaluations and I hope that they are conclusive to some degree. Do you have a sense of how you would present that to parents to leave it open so they would still get services but not be definitive in the diagnosis?

Dr. Cathy: I have an easier life because I work at an autism center, so I realize that it’s different for me than someone who works in a more general place, because families have bitten the bullet by [00:41:00] walking in here. What we do say here is we say, look, your child barely met criteria for ASD on the ADOS. I don’t know if he has ASD. That’s what I would say.

I don’t know. He’s little, he’s got everything going for him. I don’t know, but I think we’ve got to get to work and make sure that this doesn’t get worse. I am going to give you this diagnosis, but I don’t know if it’s going to last. Let’s assume this is a working diagnosis but I honestly don’t know if it’s really going to hang on.

Dr. Sharp: Okay. That’s good to hear.

Dr. Cathy: That’s what I would say. I would say, if you don’t want to think of this as a diagnosis, it’s fine. If you want to leave this [00:42:00] up in the air, it’s okay.

Dr. Sharp: Okay. And giving them permission to embrace it however they’d like.

Dr. Cathy: If families say, I don’t think so, I would say, you know what, I am with you. I don’t want you to walk away from this and not do the things that I think he needs now because there’s enough going on here that you came and then I see. That’s what I would say. And then we know that many kids at this age get worse, so we don’t want that to happen. So that’s what I would say.

I would also say, look, this is so in that mild range that I’m not saying to you, this is forever. I’m not saying this is a lifelong diagnosis, I’m just saying, let’s get going.

Dr. Sharp: Okay. [00:43:00] That’s really helpful. I want to be respectful of your time. It seems like these interviews go by so fast, this one particularly. Can I ask one last question that’s related to that and your thoughts on the idea of someone growing out of autism?

Dr. Cathy: Sure. I think it happens. I didn’t used to think it happens, but I think that partly it’s that we are diagnosing autism in smarter kids. I think both formal early intervention makes a difference. The key in early intervention is both direct services, but also parents realizing they’ve got to keep kids engaged and that sometimes they have to change their behavior, that it is different having a [00:44:00] child with ASD, or a child who may have ASD.

In our longitudinal study, we have a significant minority of the people who have average intelligence do seem to be moving out of the spectrum. It’s not the majority. It’s also important to point out that there also are people who clearly still have ASD as adults who are doing okay. So it’s not whether moving out of the spectrum is any better than staying in the spectrum, but having a job and being happy in your life, it’s not better, probably.

It’s quite amazing to see somebody that you knew when they were two who had pretty classic autism who doesn’t anymore. I think that it can happen. [00:45:00] Mostly, it doesn’t happen early. It can but it mostly doesn’t. It’s a long process.

Dr. Sharp: Okay. Thank you. I appreciate all your thoughts and the time. This has been a pleasant conversation. I’m aware there’s so much more we could talk about, but maybe there’s a round two somewhere down the road here on the podcast.

Dr. Cathy: Good question.

Dr. Sharp: Thank you. This has been great. Could we maybe end with any resources on training in the ADOS or ASD assessment in general that you might recommend to folks or ways to get better?

Dr. Cathy: WPS, which is the Western Psychological Services, which is the publisher keeps updates of ADOS trainings, which are now all over the place. I’m [00:46:00] sorry, I don’t keep track of them.

Dr. Sharp: I’m sorry.

Dr. Cathy: We do training and UCSF does training twice a year here. They’re also pretty much all over the U.S. and pretty much all over the world now. If you’re interested in particular places, you can email me and I’ll pass you on to our coordinator and they can let you know for specifics. I don’t know books and stuff.

The good news about the ADOS is we have an adapted ADOS now, which I don’t know if WPS is going to sell, but there is an adapted ADOS for less able adults that is available. You probably know there’s a toddler version. So we are continuing to try to expand it to make it more [00:47:00] appropriate for more people. So we’ll keep working on that.

Dr. Sharp: That sounds great. I’m going to keep close tabs on all these projects. You’ve got some cool stuff going on. It sounds like you’re working so hard to develop these measures, use them in your clinic and then use that feedback to tweak the measures. Just going through that whole process where you’re incorporating all these sources of information in the real world and research, that’s fantastic.

Dr. Cathy: Thanks, Jeremy.

Dr. Sharp: Sure. Cathy, it’s been an honor to be able to spend some time with you. I appreciate it. Hopefully, our paths will cross in the future again.

Dr. Cathy: Thank you very much.

Dr. Sharp: All right, take care.

Dr. Cathy: Bye bye.

Dr. Sharp: All right, y’all. Thanks again for listening to that interview with Dr. Cathy Lord. She’s clearly done a ton over the years and continues to do pretty [00:48:00] incredible clinical and research work in the field of autism spectrum assessment.

Thanks again to our episode sponsor, Practice Solutions, a full-service billing company. They do a fantastic job. They are incredible. If you are interested in billing services, give them a call. You can get a discount off your first-month services if you use The Testing Psychologist or my name, where you can go to practicesol.com/jeremy and sign up that way. They’re happy to answer any questions too. It’s a no-pressure initial consultation for sure. So check it out if you’re looking for a billing service.

As always, if you have not checked out our Facebook group, I would invite you to do that. We have nearly 500 members strong, at least at the time that I am recording this podcast, likely to be over 500 by the time it’s released. We talk about testing. We [00:49:00] talk about the business of testing, case consultation here and there. It’s really a cool group that’s got a lot going on. We do consulting giveaways and all sorts of things. So check that out if you are interested in finding more community around testing.

If you’re interested in learning more about consulting or building your practice in testing or tweaking it or taking it in the direction you want to take it, I’m happy to talk with you as well. You can sign up for a complimentary pre-consulting phone call on the website, which is thetestingpsychologist.com. You can also get a lot of information there about consulting services and whether that’s right for you. So if that is interesting at all to you, give me a shout, I’d love to talk with you and see if consulting could be helpful.

So y’all take care. I should have two more episodes coming out here before the Christmas season. In the meantime, I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season and staying warm or staying cool, depending on where you’re [00:50:00] at, and having a good year. We’ll talk to you later. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.

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