Question
How would you prepare for an eight week training and what would you do? Also, how do you bill for these mindfulness services?
Answer
With regards to preparing for mindfulness training, there are a lot of models out there. You can get online and search for examples. In the one I told you about, the first part is perception. People actually have to think about how they are perceiving their environment. You might spend a couple weeks on just perception; perceiving your environment and what is going on in your body. Are you mindful when you eat? Are you mindful in thinking, and attending, and all those other areas? That would be the first part. The second part would be actually practicing some mindfulness-based interventions like the meditation, Hatha yoga, the sitting meditation, or the walking meditation. There is actual programs that are set up in eight week segments that you can look at online for how to implement those, but that is how I would do it.
With regards to billing for mindfulness services, there are many things to be aware of. If you are working in behavioral health, as you know, there are more blanket coverages for these types of things under other services. I think you could go into the workforce and work on developing contracts with organizations or companies, just like when you go in and you do ergonomic assessments. You could do a survey to determine if the employees felt more of a sense of well-being and more job satisfaction after intervention. You could also go into an organization and identify that the worker compensation claims have been reduced since you introduced interventions for work safety to prevent cumulative trauma. I think the same thing could be done in the work environment to make sure that people have job satisfaction and to ensure that they will continue to contract with occupational therapy services.
