Blogs

Published in the April 2024 issue of the ISHA Voice.

• ISHA’s School Affairs Committee continue to work with the Speaking 4 Children multidisciplinary group to advocate for manageable workloads and financial support to students who want to become SLPs or Audiologists. Linnea Anderson Guther and Diane Barnes-Maguire participated in the ISHA Clinical Fellow Webinar to encourage soon-to-be CFs to consider a career in the school setting. Karen Kockler has continued to work with school district groups in learning how to use the ISHA workload documents.
• ISHA’s Evidence-based Practice Committee presented two sessions at the 2024 ISHA convention: One promoted discussion of evidence-based practice issues in which members have indicated interest, and one was presented jointly with the Ethics Education Committee looking at scenarios from EBP and ethics perspectives.  In response to members' requests for evidence related to Gestalt Language Processing, the committee have recently provided ISHA with a link to a proposed systematic review. The proposed completion date for this review is December 2024, and the EBP Committee will provide more information when it becomes available. Also, in response to members' interest, Dr.Carol Szymanski has completed an article for the ISHA Voice regarding Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) diagnosis.
• ISHA’s Medical Practice Issues Committee has recruited two new committee members.  The committee continues to submit articles relating to medically-based topics for the ISHA Voice.  ISHA’s Medical Practice Issues Committee is also available to answer questions members may have related to working in the medical setting. 
• ISHA’s Honors Committee is seeking nominations for the Class of 2025.  Please consider nominating a colleague for an ISHA award for 2025. Honors and nomination forms are available in the Members Only section of the ISHA website. Nominations are due May 15th.
• ISHA’s Billing and Reimbursement Committee continues to work on advocacy efforts for rate increases to Medicaid and insurance reimbursement. Members of our committee work collaboratively on the Medicaid coalition, which was successful in advocating for a 14.2% increase to Medicaid rates for speech-language therapy. We have distributed surveys to speech-language pathologists to gain data regarding reimbursement rates and insurance enrollment. We have established a regional outreach to other states regarding rate reimbursement.