Kintinu'd Conversations
You’re listening to Kintinu’d Conversations. We’re healthcare providers working at Kintinu Telerehab out of Omaha, NE. We provide physical, occupational, speech, and psychological therapy to help individuals around our country get back to life. This podcast is designed to engage a variety of listeners on topics that matter to us-- whether at work, in life, or in our relationships.
Kintinu'd Conversations
S3E23 - The Playbook, Part 1
Backed by decades of experience producing exceptional clinical outcomes, Kintinu Telerehab connects recovery to everyday life. In this podcast, we explore hot topics in rehabilitation, the keys to personal growth and recovery, and how to apply it all to the real-world.
What if there was a way to seamlessly transition rehab patients back into their communities, saving both time and resources? In this episode of Kintinu’d Conversations, Brad Dexter, Steve Kerschke, and Claire Thelen sit down to discuss navigating catastrophic injury care and rehabilitation.
We unpack our unique model, which provides rehabilitative care in an applied, functional, and purposeful manner. The conversation moves towards the challenges encountered when easing individuals back into their communities and how tele-rehab emerged as a distinct solution to this issue. Claire and Steve share their thoughts on how an interdisciplinary collaborative team approach boosts efficiency and outcomes. As we wrap up, we delve into the unique experience of building our tele-rehab program from a place of creativity and vision, without the pressure of a crisis forcing us to act. This episode is full of insights, don't miss it!
Listen to the episode on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, and Buzzsprout, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Welcome to continued conversations where we explore hot topics and rehabilitation, the keys to personal growth and how to apply it all to the real world. Hey, welcome back to the conversation. This is Brad Dexter. I have Steve Kershky and Claire Thielen in studio with me today, and you know we've been talking recently just about a lot of the things that we've learned in the last five years of doing tele rehab, and so we we thought maybe it'd be really helpful both to us and hopefully to our audience as well, to take the time to just kind of sit back and reflect on where have we come from, how did this thing start five years ago and where are we now and what have we learned in between. And so we're going to develop a few conversations based off of that premise, and today we're going to really just focus on the beginning of continue tele rehab and our parent company, qli. So really how we got our start and, steve, I'm going to kick it over to you to maybe share a little information about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, let's. Let's start with QLI. Qli has been around for over 30 years now and we started as primarily a rehab provider for individuals with brain injuries and over the years Brad, you and I have been part of this We've slowly added areas of expertise spinal cord injury, chronic pain, limb loss, basically anything that's neurological and catastrophic. We have had the fortune of learning and really growing and gaining some expertise in so that's that's what we're known for around the country. I love the fact that we treat individuals from all over the country. They come to Omaha.
Speaker 2:We have a center of excellence model and really that center of excellence model a big piece of what we do.
Speaker 2:Really two things, well, I guess three. One, we deliver excellent medical care to. We do it in a way that's what we call applied and functional, meaning everything around our rehab is tied directly to where these individuals are going and it's very contextual and it generalizes really well. And then, third, we look at the whole person and we find the things that are motivating and that they find optimism about, and then that give the individual purpose and really wrap the therapy around that than doing it the other way around. So that's our tri-dimensional therapy model and because we're a center of excellence, we ran into the problem of having to make sure that these individuals get transferred back into the community and with that problem was born teller rehab as a solution, and that is really one of the main reasons that we started. We for all the individuals that come to QLI, we transition them back home and teller rehab has been a really use of technology in order to help us deliver that transition and discharge planning and carry in and continuity of care back into the community.
Speaker 1:And maybe can you talk a little more specifically about the problem behind transitioning people back into their communities?
Speaker 2:Well, one, it's costly, and not only in financial resources but time, and so, prior to teller rehab, the individuals from our inpatient therapy team would phone calls, hop on a plane, hop in a car and drive solely to make that transition, and it might be just for a couple of days or it could be in intervals for multiple days over multiple months. And that, inherently, was the problem that now we can use virtual care and we can use video to maybe eliminate a visit or two or eliminate an entire visit completely, because we can see the person contextually. And that's the other thing, extra nature of the training that needs to happen. So, first and foremost, making a transition or a referral to a clinician who, let's just say, is used to seeing ACLs and is an orthopedic clinician or even a pediatric speech language pathologist. They're not used to seeing referrals like this, and so we can avoid that because we can keep our clinicians who do have expertise, involved.
Speaker 2:Secondly, the fact that we can see these individuals in their environment. It's very contextual, meaning we can see exactly what's going on and we can treat real time rather than it being out of context, where we depend on the report of the individual or their family and to say like, yeah, here's how the morning routine is going or here's what's challenging at work, and then we start to piece it together and in some ways, are just guessing. So those are just a few reasons why Teller Rehab has been really, really valuable.
Speaker 1:And Claire or Steve either one of you can talk about this but how have we tried to build our Teller Rehab program so that it's not a siloed approach? You know, we one of the things that we've taken from QLI is just to do what makes sense model right, which can incorporate a lot of what you were talking about, steve, in terms of seeing people in context, being able to follow them through some of the ups and downs of transitioning back home. So why is there so much value in not just seeing the PT or just seeing the OT or just the psychologist, and maybe having more of a well rounded collaborative approach?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, we kind of come at this because all of our clinicians basically grew up at QLI and so all we really know is this interdisciplinary collaborative team approach. So it was only natural that we would try to adapt that to essentially an outpatient therapy setting. But we see all the time where someone will make a referral for only PT and the programs just aren't as effective. The physical therapist A there's just more going on usually than something physical. But having an extra set of eyes and having these other disciplines allows us to take a really well rounded approach and in a way it does add a few more resources, but it also increases the efficiency of our programs and increases the outcomes of our programs. And the case managers that we work with, the individuals that we work with, are actually happier because they're just getting more, for really they just get more than just that siloed approach and it just becomes more well rounded, which I know I mentioned already. So yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Claire, do you want to talk a little bit about, maybe, the uniqueness of shaping our program from a place of creativity prior to a pandemic, instead of coming at it through that crisis like many other folks probably did?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the question you're asking is kind of we didn't have the pressure of the pandemic when we were building this. We really had some space to brainstorm and to process and to just dream a little bit about what this was going to be, without really living through a pandemic and needing to make it work really, really fast. So we had some years prior to the pandemic where we were able to really be visionaries for the tele-rehab program and that really allowed us to learn things, try things, experiment, figure out what works, figure out what doesn't, even in terms of, I guess, provider side, not just from the patient side. So I think this really allowed us to flourish and to be super creative in our approach, because we didn't we weren't under the pressure of having to make it work.
Speaker 2:You know, because of where we came from, it's pretty normal for a new service offering a new business, whatever you want to call it the vision from where you started and the vision from where you are, like you know, several years down the road is pretty common, commonly just different, and I think that's that's somewhat the case for us, and we spend a lot of time making sure that people understand. How are we associated with QLI, and that's because we do a lot of the same things. But then how are we different? And we talk about it in terms of.
Speaker 2:I spent the first part of this talking about QLI's inpatient post acute rehab program, which requires someone to be on QLI's campus in Omaha, nebraska, and now we have these tele rehab services that do not require the person to be on our campus. In fact, our clinicians are virtually with them and usually here in Omaha, but it's also a service. So, claire, I know you're in this conversation a lot. How do you explain that to our case managers? And? And what are? What are the? What are the things that people need to know about that?
Speaker 3:It's hard for people to distinguish the difference between QLI and continue to tell rehab and not only distinguish the difference but distinguish and how they are also related and how we're under the QLI umbrella and how we are kind of this outpatient arm of QLI, if you will. So, like you mentioned, we we were born from QLI pre pandemic. We everything we really learned and everything you guys as therapists learned working on the end patient team, you guys took over to continue and so the idea of how this was built was from transitions, home and discharge trips and things like that. So all really good nuggets of information for us to be able to build this program. Since then there's so much more that we now know that happens after a discharge.
Speaker 3:So I think, in looking at the difference between us and the QLI inpatient program, I I always explained that we're just an extension of QLI. So we have a lot of expertise but almost a little bit different expertise because we aren't as embedded during this really I don't want to call it post acute but acute time. We see people after discharge but we see people, you know, five to 10 years after discharge. So we have so much more information about what unfolds not just three months later, but 10 years later, I would say that the difference between the programs is just kind of what you're looking at is the continuum and where we fall and what, what type of expertise we are able to provide just along the entire continuum, not just really during that post acute, acute time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you want to?
Speaker 2:add anything to that, steve? I mean the only thing. I mean I think that's perfect. Use the word continuum. Right, we've essentially added services later on in the continuum which could be considered community based. You might hear the term outpatient therapy. We hesitate to use outpatient therapy for all the things that Claire just mentioned in terms of, or even you just alluded to. People think about patient therapy as I go to a PT or I go to an OT or I go to a psychologist and I just go to that one person, and so it has. When you come to our program, we're at the outpatient level of care or the community based level of care. But you get this interdisciplinary offering, but it just happens to be later on in the continuum and we just happen to be affiliated with QL and that's a really great thing in our mind because we can collaborate with our inpatient team, but we also function separately and we can do some things a little bit differently, and that's a really good thing because of where we sit and and when we get people.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Our mission is that we're shaping lives virtually anywhere, right, and I love that thought, because when we say shaping lives, really we're talking about you know again, seeing them in their context, their own homes, their own communities, what those relationships look like. But then it's coming back to how do you create these habits and help them create these habits that are long lasting, right, and life changing, and we'll maybe get into this in some later conversations. But you know we talk ad nauseam. You know about the power of neuroplasticity, right, and those changes are going to happen through strong routines.
Speaker 1:We truly believe people can learn, they're going to learn and change years beyond those initial catastrophic injuries, right. And so, as we kind of continue on in different conversations with these themes, we're going to be looking at, you know, some of those concepts of community based care, value based care, virtual first care, so terms that we often talk about and that have been maybe even utilized more and more over the last five years here, being a proactive versus a reactive approach, when we're helping to build those habits within the context of people's lives and then beginning to look at key concepts that we are often thinking about as we're delivering care and ultimately we'll kind of get to what we've learned through this entire process and how we've kind of built some different programs for different needs that we've been serving over the last several years. So, you guys, thank you for your time, thanks for having the conversation and looking forward to continuing this in the future.
Speaker 3:Thanks for joining the conversation with us today. If you found it helpful, please share with your family and friends. You can learn more about us on our website at continuetelerehabcom, or check us out on YouTube, instagram and Facebook.
