CHS Alum Uses UK Training to Create Successful Telehealth Program

Tori Schaub remembers the exact moment when the world — and her life — changed.  

It was January 2020, and Schaub, a 28-year-old speech pathologist at Associates in Pediatric Therapy in Louisville, was called to a meeting with her co-workers and their CEO. The message? That the new virus they’d heard about, COVID-19, could affect their business. 

It could actually prove to change their entire model, as well as other models in the medical community. And if it caused the kinds of problems they thought it could, then Associates in Pediatric Therapy would have to transition — quickly — to utilize more telehealth options, where the professionals could counsel and help their patients in a virtual format.  

Immediately, Schaub was forced to become wise beyond her years. Fortunately, in 2016, she’d found the telehealth topic interesting, so she studied it under UK’s Joneen Lowman, PhD, CCC-SLP. One of the topics? How to implement telehealth for your company.  

“We were very lucky to have a foundation — I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like to try to start telehealth from scratch,” said Schaub, who graduated from UK in 2017 with a degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders. “We had software and we had a training program that I’d developed from what I’d learned at UK. And even then, it was still a challenge to transition.” 

Trying something new

Now, Schaub’s knowledge has become even more vital. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, she was able to help her business, as well as others, transition to telehealth. It’s become a huge part of her job — she even added the title of Telehealth Program Developer — and she’s thankful for how UK’s CHS prepared her for a world she could’ve never imagined. 

“I knew it was a thing that was growing, and so I thought it might be a good time to try something new,” she said. “And Dr Lowman is really smart — I totally trust what she brings to the table. She was very forward-thinking in developing that program.” 

Fortunately, Schaub had been working on making telehealth a reality for the company since 2017. Shortly after being hired, Schaub had filled out a survey for her company that had included, among other things, questions about her familiarity with telehealth. Schaub had been among the first group of students to complete UK’s Linking Kids to Speech Language Pathologists (LinKS) program, run by UK College of Health Sciences Associate Professor Joneen Lowman. She noted this educational experience in the survey.

UK’s LinKS program helps future speech-language pathologists effectively utilize telehealth for children in rural areas of Kentucky. Although LinKS is designed for use in a school setting, the lessons learned in the program can be applied in other environments.

“Tori was able to find a perfect setting that was ready to get ahead of that curve,” Lowman said. “It says a lot about LinKS and what we’re teaching them that they’re ready to hit the ground running as new therapists in that arena.”

‘Nobody else had that training’

As a new grad — and not even fully certified as a speech therapist yet, which requires a full year of clinical work — Schaub was initially a little overwhelmed at the idea of building this program from scratch.

But, she realized, her background made her the ideal — and only — candidate who could make this happen for her company. Though Kentucky TeleCare has been offering some healthcare services virtually for a while, UK’s College of Health Sciences is one of the few health science colleges nationwide to have a robust telehealth program that helps prepare other future health care workers. In addition to LinKS, Lowman runs a telehealth graduate certificate program, the first of its kind among health science colleges and the only telehealth certificate available in the state of Kentucky.

“The thing was, nobody else had that training that I had from UK,” Schaub said.

In the ensuing years, Schaub built out a small telehealth program consisting of herself and a few other speech therapists. It was a bit of an uphill battle to get buy-in on the program, but she was convinced the telehealth model could work.

“The primary idea is access to care,” she said. “It’s not something totally different from what we’ve been doing. It’s still therapy; it’s just a different medium we’re doing it through.”

Thinking back to her time at UK, Schaub notes that she had some hesitancies around adding a focus on telehealth to her educational curriculum, because it just wasn’t the way therapies were traditionally performed. However, she ultimately thought it could be beneficial in the future — and that paid off in a big way.

“I feel incredibly fortunate to have picked UK, because it created that opportunity for me,” she said. “When I started that program, I was like, ‘I don’t know about this. But it seems like it might be important soon.’ Technology is growing, and growing, and growing. Therapy should get behind that. I would much rather be on that side of the fight, versus resisting the change, so that when something like [a pandemic] comes up, you’re ready.”

Lowman, who describes Schaub as her “poster child” for implementing telehealth into real-life practice, says that with this May’s graduates, LinKS will have 40 alumni out working in the field, including four who have joined Schaub at APT. She notes that the program’s success is due in large part to strong support from Health Sciences Dean Scott Lephart, who understood the need to build a telehealth program that would train students to lead health care into the future. With COVID-19 proving the merits of virtual therapy, Lowman says telehealth training will be a necessity for future therapists who want to stay ahead.

“Telehealth is the future of health care,” Lowman said. “This is where health care is heading — not for every patient or every circumstance — but this is the future. You’re either on board, or your practice will be left behind.”