Do You Really Need the CCC in Private Practice? | Fix SLP Summer School Ep. 1

8:39PM Jun 22, 2025

Speakers:

Jeanette Benigas

Preston Lewis

Elizabeth Nielsen

Keywords:

Fix SLP

private practice

CCC

advocacy

ASHA

clinical fellowship

student supervision

insurance credentialing

Medicare

Medicaid

CAQH

member input

transparency

communication

action plan.

Welcome to the Fix SLP Summer School Series where we're schooling the system all summer long. If you're ready to challenge the status quo in speech language pathology, you're in the right place. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode, and if something fires you up, leave us a message on the minivan meltdown line at fixslp.com. Grab your favorite summer beverage and let's get to work.

Hello again, fellow fixers. Preston Lewis joining you today. It's the first day of our official Fix SLP Summer School, and I am so delighted to be here with you. Dr Jeanette Benigas is on a much needed vacation down in the Sunshine State. So we hope she's having a great time, and I'm enjoying today by one of my favorite fixers. I mean, I love all my fellow fixers, but Elizabeth Nielsen and I get a chance to chat every once in a while, and it's always so much fun to catch up with you and be in conversation. Elizabeth, how are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm excited to jump off with the summer school with you, and don't worry, we're not going to quiz you guys on anything over summer school, so no worries on that end. So it's yeah, the content here, and the questions are easy, so we are we are glad to be with you. And it's been a big week. It's funny, as I'm recording this right now, we always deal with the myriad of technical issues, and in my ear right now I've got, like, that connection sound for Bluetooth. It's coming and going, so I'm going to try to fix this on the fly. And the other night, I had that same dinging in my ears. I sound like, you know, if I'm really getting old, but there really was that notification ding in my ears when I tried to listen to the ASHA live chat with the CEO, Elizabeth, you were there and part of that conversation, how did that go?

So we had a nice little watch party fix. SLP, watch party for that. It was. So the first half was basically them describing what their advocacy teams look like. And then the second half they started to talk about the CMS changes. Basically, they said that they are waiting to hear back to meet with CMS, and they talked about their petition. So not a ton of call to action, which is a little unfortunate, just because people are losing their jobs. I just saw someone commented on one of the posts that I shared that I had a job offer. Now it's gone, but we need to get the ball rolling. One thing that kind of stood out to me that the CEO said during the chat, I'm going to read the quote, and then maybe we can chat a little bit about it, because I have some big feelings about it. When she said it, she said so many of the issues, we ask for member input, because we want the input we get member response as opposed to member input. We don't need people to get angry with us because we asked for it. We need people to tell us what they want, what it is that you want instead of what we have. We know that what we have needs to be changed, or whatever we've put out here is something we want you to react to. So let us or tell us what it is that you think it should be. That's why it's here. That's why this process exists.

I kind of bent my mind into a pretzel hearing that because there are a lot of different ways to interpret that statement.

A lot of different ways, and I actually just re shared on my tiny voice stories yesterday about a post that I made last year about the word angry and how we keep being titled as angry, and it's frustrating because it's very invalidating, it's very dismissive, and my post kind of talks about Dr Ross Green's quote, like, when children are not giving us a hard time. They're having a hard time. SLPs are having a hard time. We're not giving you a hard time. Yes, we're angry, and we have every right to be angry. We've done all the checks and balances to communicate what we need for our field. And then we're just told that we're being angry, and it's almost like, well, you can tell us, give us input, but be polite about it, or don't make us uncomfortable about it. And so that was kind of upsetting just to hear that, and I feel like she was acknowledging that there needs to be a change. She said, like, yep, this has to be changed. At least they're maybe changing their mind. They're shifting their mindset on it. But listen to your members. Then, you know, if things need to be changed. So listen to your members. So the angry line, it's very like tone policing. Ask us politely about this once. No, we have, we've done that a lot. So that was frustrating. And then like saying, like, we want your input, you don't give us input. And I feel like that's kind of a deflection. Member, response is input, especially when it comes from, like, all of our lived experiences that we're telling them. So framing this kind of makes it sound like it's neatly packaged suggestions that like critique, especially like emotional critique, isn't. And that's just not how trust gets rebuilt. If ASHA really wants that authentic engagement and that leadership needs to be clear of owning its proposals and actions and inviting that real dialog and just not these reactive statements. Like, listen to us. We have a lot to say.

It's so easy to just throw out a label of somebody being angry or, you know, this is a grievance party. This is chatter on the internet. But when you've never really sat down and had a conversation with people, when you've taken 6000 petitions and you just sort of threw it out and said, Well, this is not even financially feasible, you know, all we wanted to rethink was just a conversation about that transparency, and we're not even getting that. So it's so dismissive to just label somebody as angry and then send them on their way. And it always strikes me as such an irony for an organization that espouses to be about communication. Wow, they really sometimes drop the ball on that. And it's it's amazing how hard it is, and it's frustrating for me to see attorneys get involved in just being unable to communicate with people, and it seems dismissive. And sometimes I think we feel like Ash is trying to be the parent that's talking to a toddler and saying, we know best Run along now children.

Yeah, exactly with our lived experiences, like we're the ones on the ground. We see all the things that need to be changed, and here we are trying to have our voices heard, and then no communication happens. And so yeah.

Fix SLP is very much pro communication. And so after some wordsmithing and trying to attenuate exactly who to reach out to we decided to go right for the top, and I had to kind of sort of face palm the other day, and I thought, wow. So it comes to this, all of our learned experiences, and we're sending a letter to Dr Oz, but those are the strange times that we live in now and our current political climate. But on the Fix SLP website, we are reaching out to the director of CMS, which is the infamous Dr Oz from television days, and he's the person there that is now the administrator. So a very well crafted letter is there, which I'm already seeing posts on social media of SLPs who are filling out that letter, and we're snail mailing it. We like to think of ourselves as a lucky, upstart kind of advocacy firm, and what a better way to really send a unique message. It's easy these days to just put everything on digital, and it kind of goes into this box that's easily thrown out. We want to put some paper there. We want to show agency that we are actually physically making ourselves present, and I'm excited to do that. The main thing is, we're also not just saying, Please reverse your decision or your current policy statement regarding the clinical fellowship, but put it on a two year moratorium. And here's the things that we need to do to be accountable for the change. So we're not looking at petition here. We're actually putting in a plan of action, and I think that's the very unique and important difference in this. Elizabeth.

Yeah, I think so too. And this is just the first part of our plan to action, too. We have a couple more coming out, so you guys to stay tuned to what after you write that letter. Here's our next step for that two years. What are we going to do at the state level, and how are we going to make these changes? And so everyone write their letters. Even encourage family members who are receiving speech therapy with Part B. Encourage everyone that you know that's impacted by this. It's going to take all of us, and I always say, like, even if all of us can just do one hour of advocacy during the week, like how much we can all change the field, even if we can just dedicate one hour a week. So sending one letter took me five minutes. It was a great template. It was nice and easy. Hopefully we can all do that.

It's a cumulative effort, and we have to make our voices heard, and our fixers are always trying to do that in different ways. And I've had some very meaningful impacts working at a granular level. So I'm excited about it. Go to the website, fix slp.com, you'll see it at the top of the page. Check out that letter, print it out, sign it, send it on and share it with your fellow SLPs, because we really do want to make a difference here, because our CFS are important to us out there, these new grads that are in SLP, we want them to get off to a good start. And as someone who started in a SNF facility breeding Part B patients, I cannot imagine the level of anxiety they must have right now. So this is a way to support them, and I think it's a positive way that shows a plan forward with a unique vision. Check out the website.

So for our quick summer school chat today, Elizabeth, I wanted to talk about having a CCC if you're in private practice. It's a really great opportunity to have this discussion, because you yourself are a private practice owner who have that consideration right now. And we hear people say, well, you know, "I have to, because I'm in private practice," and then we have some people who say, "all the more reason, I'll let it go" talk about some of your considerations as a small business owner with respect to the CCC.

So doing some research too, even prior like when Fix SLP first started, I had to do my own research. I've been in private practice for 10 years now, and I needed to make sure all my checks and balances were in place. I was looking at the CA, Q, h, which is the Council for affordable, quality health care. And it's basically just like an online database where all health care providers store their professional information. And there is a section on there that has, are you board certified? And there was a yes or no, and really, you can just say no, and I haven't even updated the CCC information in CAQH in years. And so that was one thing I knew, like, oh, okay, I don't need that looking at insurance billing, I know that's been some misunderstandings that we see all the time on the internet. So I'm a Blue Cross, Blue Shield PPO provider, and to credential with them, I do not have to have the CCC. So that's the case for a lot of private insurances, and I know Medicare, they do not require the CCC. And if you look up our maps on fixslp.com, you know that there's only a couple states that require it for Medicaid, and Illinois is not one of them. So I'm good in that aspect. And there's also this fear of like, oh, well, you won't be marketable if you don't have the CCC. About a year ago, I eliminated the CCC from my signature line. I eliminated it from emails that I send out evaluation reports that I send out on my website, and guess what, I still have a wait list I get calls weekly, that didn't not change anything about what my business looks like once I removed the CCC after my name. So you're marketable. Life went on like, Yes, you are a licensed speech pathologist. You are marketable. You have value. So those were some of the things that I had to look into, just seeing, what do I need to do?

And this will touch closely into that student supervision issue, because a lot of people say, Well, I have students. I have to carry that in order to supervise them. And the nuance is, and we always have to clarify it, you can still supervise students without having an active CCC. You just can't supervise them toward that pathway. So for a lot of people, that's still the flaw, that hook that's in everybody's side to keep them going along. I myself a few years ago, was actually headed toward private practice before I fell into a really good position. However, at the time I pre-Fix SLP, awareness, I think I would have now been in that position, had I done that, where I would have been comfortable letting it go, because I never have been a supervisor in the technical sense, I took on a couple of students that another SLP was going through some issues where she still technically was the supervisor, but I was doing a lot of that hands on time. Don't tell Asha, well, I don't care if you tell them. Now I no longer have a CCC, but nevertheless, I felt very much at ease providing that supervision and that mentorship to students, and it wouldn't slow me down now and some point, some people have to finally have a conversation with universities to say, Hey, I am no longer comfortable paying my annual tribute. So if you're in private practice, you have these considerations, just know that you can have that flexibility and freedom. But do like Elizabeth, check with your current insurance providers or the people that you're sending off your billing to make sure you're comfortable in that setting. If you provide to a school or a hospital, check those regulations, but it's all the more reason to have that conversation and to reach out to your fellow people in this field to say, this is not a license, and I don't have to continue to put up my annual tribute and pay my $7,500 over the course of a lifetime to ASHA to prove that I'm an SLP. And so private practice, yeah, because we're seeing more of it, it's out there. It's the, probably the hottest growing part of our profession. Whether it's actual brick and mortar private practice or you're just basically a do it yourself kind of person that's going out and serving contracts. What a great time to have that conversation about freedom, right? Yeah, absolutely. So this has been fun. I'm looking forward to these summer school kind of discussions. And Elizabeth, it's always great being in conversation with you and catching up.

Yeah, it was so great to talk with you, too. And if anything pops up, when you guys are looking at your credentialing with insurances and you see like, oh, they do require the CCC talk to them, sometimes they don't recognize that it's not needed. Or if there's an issue in any sort of laws, send us the laws we want to see the laws.

Absolutely.

Because then we can make those changes. So

We are a two way dialog organization. We want to hear from you.

Yes, talk to us!

Right.

Give us some responses, some input.

Okay, so for Dr Jeanette Benigas, who is hopefully enjoying a nice cold beverage on the beach in the Sunshine State, and for my friend Elizabeth Nielsen, this is Preston Lewis saying, Thanks for fixing it!

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