Small Business vs. Big Players: The Real Cost of Offering ASHA Approved CEUs

5:14AM Oct 16, 2024

Speakers:

Jeanette Benigas

Preston Lewis

Meredith Herold

Keywords:

ASHA CEUs

CE tracker

CE costs

CE quality

CE providers

CE requirements

CEU automation

CEU tracker

CEU reporting

CEU fees

CEU process

CEU standards

CEU system

CEU transparency

CEU trends

Hey, fixers. I'm Dr Jeanette benigas, the owner of fix SLP, a grassroots advocacy firm here to challenge the status quo in speech language pathology by driving real change from insurance regulations to removing barriers that prevent full autonomy like the CCC, this podcast is your space to learn, engage and take action in the field of speech language pathology. We don't wait for change. We make it so let's fix SLP.

Hey everybody, welcome back. It's Jeanette. I've got Preston with me. We're just going to jump right in with a review as we're getting started. I don't think I've read this person's one yet. I just opened up the app and picked one. I scrolled and picked one. This is from Nat underscore, Joseph, J, O, S, E, P, H, A, and that person says, Thank you for your tireless efforts in gaining fair rights for such an important profession. Short, sweet, to the point we love it. Give us your five star rating and review. Hopefully we can get you on and we'll we'll give you a shout out. The other thing that we're doing is I'm going to ask for some money, and then I'm going to tell you recently how we've used it. We have a sustaining Partnership Program. We're asking for a minimum of $5 a month for people who love what we're doing. You see the petition? You see what we did in Michigan. Now we're working with Delaware. We're we're putting this money to good use. It also helps fund our back end. But something else that we have done that we have not talked about is occasionally, if there is a good cause, we will take a very small portion of the money and donate on behalf of fixed SLP, and we know that hurricane Helene has hit some southern states pretty hard. And while there are many, many, many rescue efforts happening, one that we weren't on top of right away, and it's because so much flows through our social media. I just miss things. But the Council for State President association or CSAP, I probably butchered that, but it's called CSAP. It's what we finally refer to here as the President's Club. All of the presidents of the state associations are part of CSAP, and CSAP in conjunction with flasha, which is the Florida State Association. I think Gisha is how you say it, the Georgia State Association. And I don't even know what they call it North Carolina, but the North Carolina State Association, they have all come together. They have put together an Amazon wish list of basic supplies, but also therapy materials to help speech pathologists and audiologists who have been displaced or impacted or affected by the hurricane. So they're providing some replacements for those people and their therapy tools. They're providing water we sent our team sent snacks today. So on behalf of fixed SLP, we did. We did go ahead and we sent a bunch of snacks, just you know, 45 bucks worth of snacks off of their Amazon wishlist. But we're trying not only using the money to advocate for SLPs, but also to support SLPs, where we find that SLPs need support. So I just wanted to let you know that that is a way that we use the money very thoughtfully, not in high amounts, but but that is also sometimes how we have directed the money, and we don't talk about it because we're not here for the praise. We're here to help. But I just wanted to let you know that we did do that recently, and that is one way that we also direct the money. So if you're interested in supporting us, you can head to fix slp.com, click sustaining partner and donate away. We put it to good use. So Preston...

... present, I'm here.

How have you been this week?

I have been very busy. It's it's been a busy week in the fixed world, and we've talked a little bit about that, and it always it's tough. You know, when you balance your day job working with your patients, and you've got a fixer wife, I think I have like five fixer wives. My phone never stopped dinging. And I just absolutely sometimes I have to turn it off, and Jeanette benigas me through a different thing and makes my phone ding again. So I never truly get rid of you, but it's been a busy week in the fixed world, in my personal world, and my daughter's been with me this week, and we've really enjoyed a little extra time with her. So it's good week so far.

I mean Preston, you've aged substantially in the last six months. You took on a real wife. We call her your personal wife. Yes, you took on me as a fixer wife, and then together we brought on a bunch more fixer wives to the So listen,

Apparently, I need mini handlers.

Yeah, this pre show chatter, which we broke out last week's into a bonus episode we need. We like to run our mouths, so we need to be careful of that. But I thought it might be fun to just kind of have fun with the pre show chatter, make it unfix SLP related. And so I have a question for you. I'm going to propose a question, and we'll try to make this fun, just so people get to know us as we progress in season two, if you could relive one day in your life without changing any detail, what would it be? What day would it be from any point in your life you can't change anything.

Well, I think I would give an answer that a lot of people would give, which is,

Oh wait, wait, wait, it can't be your wedding or the day your children were born. Oh, okay, that's yeah, sorry, I had that caveat, and my bad memory forgot, because that's where you were about to go.

Okay, okay, so yes, if you take those things out, I would say that the day I would choose, this is off the top of my head, just picking a day at random, and I won't pick a day that I met my spouse or anything like that as well. So we'll take those obvious answers out. I think the day that I walked into the Louisiana Superdome and I was 20 years old, I think, yes, I was 20, and I was the ARENA ANNOUNCER at rounds one and two of the NCAA basketball tournament in the Superdome, which I found out was a very hard place to announce because of the delayed auditory feedback with the roof of the dome being so high. But as a young kid, getting to sit across from CBS sports announcer Jim Nance and get to visit with him, that was a huge opportunity in a broadcast career that I did an option and stay with but wow, what a what experience that was. And I had a lot of Goosebumps that day.

I love that. So this is kind of unfair, because I've had a chance to think about mine and listen, I'm a I'm not a glass half empty or glass half full kind of girl. I'm like, my glass fell over and then someone stepped on it and crushed it into 1000 pieces. Kind of Girl. So like, finding the one day for me, it's hard because I'm very self critical. And you know, just it was hard for me, it was hard for me to pick and so what I'm going to share is questionable at best because of the circumstances which I will describe, but I think it's the feeling that I continue to take away from it that has made me choose this, and that would be the day that I defended my dissertation. And here's why, getting through my PhD program was not easy. I now know why. In this process, you guys, we haven't really shared this publicly, but in the last few months, I have been diagnosed with a very, very severe ADHD. I'm medicated. Now I'm doing a lot better. Shout out to people who struggle with that kind of stuff. I see you, especially as you move into perimenopause, I really see you. But anyway, getting a PhD was very difficult for me. It's not that I didn't have the brains for it, it's it was more the attention and focus and memory that I struggle with and executive functioning. So getting to the end was a big deal. If you follow us for a while, you will see back in August, I shared a story about when my father passed away, he had perioperative neurocognitive disorder. Please go find that post. It's very important to be aware of for either your family or your patients. But anyway, I was supposed to defend within days of that popping up. And so we pushed it back. And then my mentor, Michelle bourgeois, who has recently passed away, I'm so grateful for her mentorship, decided to resign from the Ohio State University. And so I had to defend and so I traveled from a hospital in western Pennsylvania five weeks into my father's illness to Columbus, Ohio to defend that particular day my dad was getting a PEG tube, which I in nursing homes and as a fees provider, there is a time and a place for a peg but Most of my career, I have fought against peg placement, and I fought as long as I could for him, but it just came to the time where we had to do it. So that, personally, was very hard for me. It was a very dark time in my life. I'm a daddy's girl, or was a daddy's girl. My dad's getting this peg now. I have to drive to Ohio State. And I struggled all the way through. I almost failed out at my last defense, which was my defense following my candidacy exams. And so I was nervous, and I got into that room. It's, you know, a public defense. I got into that room, I had my panel of four or five professors there, and it very quickly, is why I'm sharing. It became the best day of my life, and I was able to stand up there and talk about my research and what I did, and the culmination of all those years of hard work, and answer very challenging questions without batting an eye. And it was supposed to be a two hour defense, and it turned into a three hour defense, not because it wasn't going well, but because it was going so well that I was just engaging with my committee and answering questions and it I have never been so proud my entire life, and I passed, I got my PhD, and then the next day, I returned to the hospital. And my dad had been sedated for five weeks, and every day they gave him a little sedation holiday, which never went well, but so this isn't the same day, but it's still part of this experience. I walked into his hospital room, and he was having his sedation holiday. He was sitting up in bed, and he was lucid, and so I told him what I did. He gave me a high five. He was trach and vent. Didn't have a passing mayor, so he couldn't talk, but he knew that I finished. And so that was all really important to me, and I think it was the last time I saw my dad lucid. He ended up passing five weeks later. But yeah, I even though my dad was dying, kind of bittersweet, I guess so I would relive that day, even though you can't change anything. If I could change anything, I changed the dad situation. But that's my day. There you go. And please go find that post perioperative neurocognitive disorder. You need to know about it. All right, so today we have Meredith Harold from the informed SLP, full disclosure. Just because disclosures are important, I can't remember if I said it when we recorded with her. I do subscribe to the informed SLP, this is not sponsored. It is not endorsed. Meredith does good work in the field, and we wanted a small business owner to come on and talk about some issues with the CEUs and PDH,

What a organization it's so much fun to see how the organization operates, familiar with their products, which are just sophisticated and outstanding, but to See Meredith in her layer during that Zoom call this organized desk, she's got all her pins there. She's just so composed and is a data driven type person, and she knows how to create a system. That's the thing that is sometimes so rewarding is that I, you know, I have plenty of SLP friends, which are just beleaguered and beaten down by rehab companies and some of them have created elegant private practices that are now thriving. She took it like next level. You know, we've had these next level kind of professionals lately, which have found a way to provide service within the field that transcends just a small area, sometimes it touches coast to coast, and she's one of those people that she's just taken this and said, How can I contribute to the field using the skills that I have? And, wow, she's hitting on every single cylinder.

You know, I love these PhDs who leave academia to do wonderful things... me, included Preston!

You know, you know, warm and fuzzy I get about those academia and so to see those people who have gone out in the private sector and lighting it up, but in a kind of watershed sort of way, I I'm humbled to get to know her.

We need to keep finding these folks who who identified problems and who went out there and fixed it. We don't wait for change. No, what's our tagline?

Great, great. We don't wait for change. We are the change.

We don't wait for change. We make it okay, yeah. So that's yeah. All right, so let's jump in with Meredith. She has lots of good points and things to think about here as you move forward with your CEUs and PDH. And do you need? The registry? Do you not do what? What do you need? What don't you need? And also, we have a map. Listen, guys, I know that our I know that our website is not user friendly. Coming into the new year, we will have a much better one. But if you go to fix slp.com, and click Quick Links, scroll down about maybe a quarter way I'm on a computer, so it might be further if you're looking on a phone or a tablet, and we have a link for you that says continuing education requires. Requirements by state, you can click that, and we have a color coded spreadsheet that it will take you to with some notes about unique requirements and then a reference so you can check for yourself. But we have that all there for you if you're wondering what exactly your state says, because most people think, oh, I need Asha CEUs, but a lot of times that's not the case. So go use our resource into the new year, hopefully there'll be a prettier one, but for now, it's a spreadsheet that you can click to and and please make use of it. If you find a mistake, let us know. It's a living, breathing document. We're always willing to change that. We just need to see the regulation to do. So all right, so let's jump in. Hey everybody, welcome back. I've got Preston with me today, and we also have Meredith Harold from the informed SLP, if you're not familiar with the informed SLP, you should be. So I'll let her just give her brief overview of what that is. Personally, I subscribe to it, not because I love Meredith, but because I love what they do. And I like to invest in good quality CEUs. I like to invest in, I mean, you have a pretty big business, but you know, the the small business owner, who is who is killing it in the field. Those are the kind of people that I like to support. So even if, every month I'm not reading, because sometimes I forget, I try, I end up doing it in batches where I'm like, Oh, I haven't done this in a while. That'll read like 10 and

then, yeah, that's normal. That is a normal behavior, and we expect that to happen, yeah.

But it is really well done. And yeah, so I it's so just that disclosure that I do support that business, but not in any sponsored kind of way. It's I was doing it before. So yeah, Meredith, tell us about who you are and what your business is, and then we're going to talk about CEUs today.

Yes. So yeah, Jeanette and I have known each other for years, just professionally. I have a background as a school based SLP. I was also a university professor for a while, and in 2016 I started the informed SLP. And basically what it is is a team of people who read all of our fields research every month. So that's hundreds of journal articles we find the bits and pieces that practicing clinicians need to know, and we dump it into basically a database. So we're essentially operating like an ebp database, where you can get in and search for things and find information that's coming directly from our fields, best clinical research. So that's what I've been doing, like I said, Since 2016 we are a C Asha approved CEU provider, which is going to be the topic of conversation today, and kind of why I came here, also because, you know, the growth of that business has been recent enough that I kind of still remember all the faces of before we had Asha CEUs, to when we had to partner with our state association to now. So that's kind of the context as to why I'm the guest today, and then also, one of the things that I have going on this year is a brand new website called inform jobs. So I've spent so long developing this ebp database, now we're developing a jobs database that's, we hope you're going to feel is drastically different than any other jobs database, in the fact that we're leading with really heavy transparency and detailed job posts. So we're essentially asking employers all the things that you would want to know about pay and benefits and caseload caps and productivity and just all those little details that nobody ever puts in job posts we're going to be doing. So moving on, moving from one database to another, from the ebp database to the jobs database is kind of what I have going on this year, and

I'm so excited about that, and we will have her back to talk about informed jobs. But listen, I'm really good at keeping secrets with or without non disclosures, because I've spent a couple of those over the last year. But Meredith disclosed really early on that she was doing this, and I told her, and at one point I was like, when is this thing coming out? Because the other thing you're going to ask is, is the CCC required? And, yeah, yeah.

Is that really good? Yeah, filters stuff. And one of the check marks is just literally, do you require C's? Yes, no. And so it's going to make it a lot easier to see, not only for the purpose of taking jobs, but also trends that are going on in our field related to pay who is and isn't requiring CS, and kind of like what the job market really looks like, and what the current, you know, landscape really looks like, as opposed to just like getting on Facebook and Reddit and being like, Have you all found employers that are okay with not having your CS? Or have you all found employers that are offering this XYZ. So

yeah, because one of the things that I've been hoping for, and especially for new graduates, is a safe I'm calling it a safe space. But when you're graduating or you're making decisions about how you're going to make money and how you're going to practice, it's really important to consider things like this. Am I going to get or not get the CCC? And we me especially, can't sit here in good conscience and tell new grads to never get the CCC if I know there's not a safe space for them to graduate to where they're going to get a job. And so obviously, we expect a lot of the postings at first are going to require the CCC, but we'll be able, or we I talk like, this is my thing. You'll be able to show some of those safer spaces as those trends change. Like, it'll be exciting to see what happens in Michigan over the next year, as as we have completely removed the barrier of the CCC in the state of Michigan, and we're hearing from a lot of people who are like, I'm dropping my C's, and I'm saying to them, that's great, and I support that, but you better check with your employer, because the likelihood that your employer is requiring that at this time is very high. So we have a lot of work to do to remove now that employer barrier, and so it'll be interesting to see is as we move into this next phase of fix SLP, where we have created the opportunity for autonomy in states, is educating employers. So we're going to be coming out with a lot of educational materials specific to each state. We're going to be investing in a better website where we can house all of those things and have them branded. So also then, if you're seeing a job on the on informed jobs that does require the CS, perhaps then you could reach into our resources and present it to that employer and say, Hey, would you consider changing this? So yeah.

and actually, we're going to be presenting those resources anyway. Anytime somebody checks that box that the Cs are required, we're automatically going to be sending them, kind of like a little, you know, handout situation coming directly from fix SLP, related to the fact that, yeah, exactly what that's going to look like. But there's no reason like, we're already in communication with employers. So anything that SLPs need us to be telling their employers, it's really easy for us to be like, Hey, by the way, consider this. You'll get more books on your job if you consider this. You know,

Alright, I'm I'm getting way off track because I'm so excited about what you're doing, and I've been watching it just like, here and there. Like, hey, where, are you in this process, and when are we doing this?

It's great.

So there will be another podcast coming with Meredith, where we really jump into all of that right now, just because I'm thinking of it, if you're interested, you're only on Instagram, right?

Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, but Instagram is always what grows fast.

I also couldn't find it. Just so, you know, I couldn't find it. I wanted to tag it on Facebook, and I could not find it.

So Facebook's been giving us some little issues, but that's that's good to know. I'll look at that, right?

So go find informed jobs. I've shared a couple things when this airs. I'll also make sure to share something in stories again or link it up somewhere. But, yeah, go find, go follow, just pay attention, because it's it's going to change the face of how we get jobs. And we know it can be successful. Just Another side note, we know it can be successful. Meredith and I both came from academia. A very similar system is set up for PhDs who want to find jobs. There are one or two places where we go to look at all of the job postings. And we don't have to go to all, you know, does monster.com still exist? I don't even know.

Yeah, just all the like, indeed, zip, recruiter, Google, like the bajillion.

There is one place, if you have a PhD and you want a job, you know where to look. And I think this is going to turn everything on its head with how we get job. So anyway, all right, let's jump into CEUs. Let's jump in. I don't even know what my first question is, because I'm so excited.

Well, do you want me to sort of walk through our, like, history and process how we became CE providers and why? Let's do that. So, um, so initially, the informed, SLP, was, you know, just educational content on a website, blog style. We actually started not even charging for it, and then I realized, oh, like people, people really want this, and we, if we make it bigger, they'll like it even more if we're covering the fields research more deeply. So, you know, we monetized. Was the first step. Then the step immediately after that, was offering downloadable certificates for professional development hours. Because one of the earliest things people were asking us is they were like, I'm consuming all this content on your website and spending all this time reading or listening to your stuff. Like, I want to be able to count it for continuing ed hours. And we were like, of course, you do like, you know, obviously that's our next step. So we weren't Asha approved CE providers for probably about three or four years, at least of the informed SLP existing, we just had downloadable certificates where, after you consumed an amount of content, you know, you download a certificate for it, but then it's like. You know these, like, layers of what customers want from you. So it was like, layer one, we want a PDF that says we did this. Layer two of, what we kept getting asked is, are you an ASHA CE provider? Like, are these, Asha CEUs? Are there Asha CEUs? And in my opinion, as a business owner, when everybody thinks they need a thing, usually you need to offer it in order to, like, stay viable in the landscape. So from that perspective, the decision to become an ASHA CEU provider was because it was just the number one thing people were asking us, and because we knew that people were going to other places for their continuing ed instead of us, purely because we didn't have Asha CEUs, right? So from a business decision. That's kind of where that comes into play. But from what I understand from you know, SLPs perspectives, I think the reason they're asking for that is two primary things. One is they think that Asha CEOs are higher quality than anything else, which we can come back to that quality discussion later, because that, in and of itself, is a deep conversation. And two, some people think that in order to maintain your Asha C's, you have to have Asha CEUs. They don't understand that you can have non Asha branded continuing ed. So it's a combination of a perception of quality layered with a misunderstanding. And I mean, to know, like, what proportion is which we'd have to, like, run a nice little research study and see what people are thinking when they're saying, I, I only want Asha CEOs, but from what people say to me all the time, that's my perception. Is that kind of your perception? Jeanette, that it's basically those two reasons,

yeah, yeah. And you've done the work at fix SLP, to really disprove those. Yeah? So yeah, one if you are someone who wishes to keep your CCC or who wants to get rid of it and can't, and so you're looking at that 30 hours every three year cycle. If you actually look at what Asha requires, they actually don't require Asha approved CEUs. They don't, they don't, they don't at all they offer. And I'm gonna, we're gonna get into this terminology and be educating over the next few weeks, because I think this is gonna air to kick off our CEU PDH run, which will go at least two weeks. PDH is professional development hour, and that can be anything related to your area of practice, or the field of Speech Pathology, or even in some states, as we've done this research, you can count your first aid or basic life support class as a PDH. Some states don't allow that, so you have to look into your state. But you can do any of that to fulfill your hours for Asha, if you're getting the C's, the only thing is, like Meredith said, you have to have a certificate. So if you are audited, if they are asking you to prove that you did what you said you did, you have to have the certificate to just upload and send in. So that's Thing Number one, if Asha was requiring their own approved CEUs. I don't know this. I think we could run into some legal issues. Maybe not, though. I don't know that for sure. The second thing is, a lot of states do not require Asha approved CEUs. Now, there are, are some there. Well, there's a lot that include it, obviously, because it is just ingrained into our field. But also you can do PDH as well. So for example, in the state of Ohio, and I know this because this is where I live, you can do any PDH again, just like for the CS and it counts. I wrote a book. And I thought, I can probably get a couple out of hours out of this. I had put my Ohio license on hold for a while, while I was teaching in another state, and when I moved back, I needed to reinstate it, and they wanted me to show 40 hours of CEUs, which I didn't yet have for the C cycle, because I was still maintaining the C's. And so I said, Well, I wrote a book while I was gone. Could you give me a couple? And so all I had to do was send them the PDF of the book. My publisher actually just sent them the book they gave me all 40 hours. Boom, yeah, right, like, you know. So it's, it's, can be that easy if you have proof of what you've done in the event that you are audited

that same way pdhs are allowed for us. It's just a PDF certificate. And there's kind of, like a couple little things to consider, again, like, I think we should maybe hold the quality discussion, because it's a whole other thing. Like, we can separate, like financial that, but you know, for from a business perspective, offering like, a downloadable PDF to prove that somebody did a thing on your website or whatever, is like the easiest thing on the planet. It's like, cheap, fast, low labor, you know, Bam, done. So. Anyhow, so within the history of the informed SLP, and kind of some of the steps that we went through so early on, I started talking to people, and I was like, what does it take to become an ashes CE provider or an Ashe? Approved CE provider. And they were like, it's like, writing a dissertation. And I was like, Well, I'm kind of busy, and so I don't know if I want to take that on. And also, like, I don't know like, like, I just need to understand this process better. So the very first thing I did is went to the Kansas State Association, which is where our we're based, in Kansas. I live in Kansas, and they are Asha approved providers. And so I asked if I could basically run my courses through them. And of course, they said yes, because I've served on their board forever, and they knew me, and they knew that I wouldn't screw it up and would be organized and would do what they told me to do, and all that stuff, you know. And so I want to say, if I remember correctly, that they were charging me $400 per course that I ran through them. And at that time, all of our courses were topic based. And so we would collect, we would have collections of stuff from our website. So we'd had, like, we had like a stuttering in preschool one, and we had like, a, you know, DLD treatment part one, and DLD treatment Part Two, you know, just they were all topic organized, but every single topic that we had was another $400 fee to Kansas in order to pay them for the fees and labor that they're required to do in order to then report it to Asha. So it's like paying kind of like a middleman in order to, you know, get it to Asha. That didn't last all that long because it was expensive. You know, obviously we had a limited number of topics that we were offering, because we couldn't offer, like, all the topics, because it would have been a new $400 fee. But I'm glad that I went through that process. Kansas charged us about as little as they possibly can. They were really nice to us, and it's it was pretty high labor for them to be doing that with us. So it got to the point at which I was about to leave a another job that I had time was opening up for me, and I was like, it's time that we just become Asha CE providers, people weren't lying when they said that the application was crazy. I basically identified the month of January. I don't remember what year it would have been. Would it have been january 2019, perhaps where I was. I basically said to myself, I'm going to get this thing out the door before the end of the month, like we're doing this. And it legitimately with me taking everything else off my plate, literally everything I possibly could. It truly was like two to three weeks of full time work. So if somebody's doing it, who has another full time job, and they're trying to tackle it by doing it, like four hours every Saturday, it will take you freaking forever. The application process is insane. So people are like, Well, what's in the application? Like, what is this thing taking so long for some of it is you proving to Asha on paper that you know how to run a course? That's evidence informed. So they require you to prove that you would know how to do that. They require you to prove that you have a system in place that won't have errors. And this one is one of the biggest issues, because if you became an ASHA CE provider and then started reporting hundreds of people's credit, sometimes 1000s, sometimes 10s of 1000s, to Asha every month, and it's incorrect in any way it causes such a labor issue on their end that you essentially are not allowed to make mistakes in reporting. And like basically most of the hoops that you jump through are hoops that prove to Asha that you will never, ever, ever, ever make a reporting error because it causes too much labor on their end to fix it. And I know people have who have done that, who are like, former ashes CE providers, and then, like, ended up dropping it because of how strict it is and how awful it is if you do screw something up. So a lot of it's just like proving that your system's clean and you know that you have a way of identifying, like, if you're reporting something wrong, and then the rest of it in the application is just proving that you understand the whole system, how to count ashes, CEU, time versus actual hours, and the equation and all that silly stuff. So that application is a doozy. But then once you do the application, I did calculations here so that you guys would have good numbers. Then once you've compiled the application, it's $1,000 to apply, and then it's $1,000 per year after that, those fees are going up. So there are going to about double in 2025 but considering what exists now, you also have fees or like, re upping your providership status. But the big picture take home is that, like a safe budget for what you're going to be paying Asha CE directly, if you're an ASHA CE provider, is $1,500 per year. Okay, so when you think of like the money that I'm sending directly to Asha for this privilege of being an ASHA CE provider, it's 1500 per year. As a business owner, I actually find that fee to be incredibly low. Go ahead Jeanette.

I want to interrupt you so as a business owner who has volume

bingo, yeah

that is low.

Uh huh

For someone like me who is offering my first fees course in a week and a half, and by the time you just airs, I'm offering my. First independent course this week. Yep, that is not low. We exactly Asha CE providers. And listen the it was the first conversation I had when I collaborated with my friend and colleague Tim Stockdale. I said, we're not offering Asha CEUs for this, right, right? I legitimately can't, if I like I'm just right now, yeah, and I got outvoted. Tim was like, Jeanette, we have to maybe down the road. We, for all of the reasons that you just said, we have to stay competitive. And I and, and, you know, he is thinking of becoming an ASHA CE provider for his company, swallowed the gap, but we, we literally, first of all, we couldn't do it in time, and we couldn't afford it. And we're going to get into these numbers, yeah, because the cost would be so high for what we would have to choose, to choose to charge to recoup our money. Yeah, we wouldn't be competitive. No one would take our course, and two people coming in with no track history. I mean, I'm all over medbridge, right? Like I have a history of teaching, but not in the fee space. We couldn't do it. And so that edges out too, the little people like me who have the knowledge and the drive and maybe would do a bang up job just can't compete that Asha is charging the same amount to someone like you who has the volume and someone like me who has never done it before. Yeah, right.

Oh yeah. And that's one thing that always surprised me, because I thought that the bigger our company got, the more they would start charging us, because we're sending 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of like points of information, like data points to them every single month, but like, they charge us the same as someone who might have a live in person, you know, course, with 30 people in it, like to imagine that you Jeanette would be paying out of your pocket, the same as what medbridge is paying. Is insanity, right? But hold in the back of your mind, who that benefits, how that benefits, and how it continues to like, uphold the system where basically like, and that's why I wanted to just outright say it like, as a business owner, that like a business my size, that's nothing like. It's nothing like, when you think of like, all the things that I'm like, you know, what's the problem here, when it comes to our bottom line, like, it just it's a non issue, which doesn't mean that, ethically, it's not a non issue. But then here's the other thing, though, because of the amount of labor that it takes for us to report our continuing ed data points, essentially like, what's the person's name, what's their ash ID number, what's their email address, What date did they take this? What date did they take this? You know, and like group all that stuff every single month and stay on top of that data to make sure that it's never, ever wrong. I ran the calculations, but for a general LIKE ASHES CE provider, like a small business who's thinking of becoming one, you do also need to be prepared for another five to 10 grand a year in labor costs, labor costs above and beyond what it would cost to just have the PDF, downloadable certificate. Because your system, communicating with Ash's system in a way that never screws up, is really labor intensive, because you have one of two things going on. It's either human labor, which is the quote I just gave you, or it's digital, and actually, for the informed, SLP, it's digital. We don't have people going through and spot check in to make sure that, like Susie's records all match and stuff. We had a custom built system on the back end, so it's not that high labor for us now, but we spent well over six figures on a report on reporting a system that would actually communicate well with ashes, and that's low. Like some people have automatic reporting, like we do an export from our back end once per month and send it to Asha, whereas a lot of these CE providers, like the much bigger ones, I'm sure you can assume who those would be, they have a system that actually communicates directly with Asha. Imagine like a little robot in the background that's sending data from their website to ashes website, and it updates the ASHA CE registry, live and all that type of stuff. So the provider fee is the tip of the iceberg, and that's what I mean when I say the provider fee is like nothing. I don't mean that to take away how huge of a deal it is for people are just getting started, because $1,500 is a lot of money when you're just getting started. But it's everything else that happens once you get into that system that's really expensive. So like, if I was advising a small business, you know, your friend who's wanting to become a CE provider, or anybody who's wanting to become a CV provider, it's not the fees that are going to kill you, it's the labor that's going to kill you. And so I would never let somebody do it, or let as though I have, I would never suggest, as a good friend and person, that somebody do it if they can't afford 10 grand a year, no way, because your labor costs are going to get out of control. And also because Asha charges you if you screw up. So even if you're like, I'll be able to make it happen. I can spot check all my spreadsheets you screw up once, $500 fee you screw. Up again, your fees go up.

Yeah, I took a little note too, as you were talking about how you're promising Asha that you will never make a mistake. Yes, over the last year, I have heard from CE providers who have shared stories, and I think it has gotten better over the last decade or two, but it is still very punitive, where they they can and will prevent you, yeah, from reporting CEUs if you make a mistake. Yeah, and, and it's almost like, you know, Meredith and this might, I think this even somehow stemmed from you. They're big daddy Asha, right? That's, yeah, that's why, exactly what it is. Big Daddy ashes like, coming down and saying, No, you made a mistake. You're, you're on probation. Do they still have the probation?

Oh yeah, there's still a probation thing. We are not on probation right now. So we are

I mean come on. We are humans, and big daddy ashes, like, Oh, you made a mistake. And it's not even, like, these huge mistakes. They can be just little mistakes. And there are people on probation where now it's impacting their business, yeah, and they Yeah, if you can't use and you're advertising that you can, and Ashley's, like, probation, how do you make money? It's it's a system that is so screwed up in my head that I'm just like, how why? Again, as our as we talk about autonomy. So if you listen to our podcast last week, or potentially two weeks ago, with ens a Humbert, we talk about, what does it mean to be autonomous in our field, and when these companies choose to be Asha CE providers, because the field is demanding it, they are losing their autonomy to offer you super good, high quality CEUs that are available to you all the time, because they now have someone they have to answer to, and that takes away their autonomy as we continue to have this conversation this year about what autonomy looks like, we are handing our autonomy away when we ask a company to be an ASHA CE provider, because we are handing the direction and the power to Asha to literally put these amazing people on probation if they make one mistake, and I don't know, maybe it's after three, you I don't I don't know how many it is. You get

They're pretty gentle when you make one minor mistake, but if it's big, it's not gentle. It's repeated. It is not gentle.

Yeah, and it happens. You know, it happens. We all make mistakes. That's how we learn. And so, yeah, yeah. I just had to jump in there with that, because I don't think people understand that that goes on in the background. I didn't know, even though I did not know that that was a thing. And again, as we get into quality, you can present crap, but as long as you're reporting right, you're good, correct, yeah, more about the process and their labor on the back end for not having to fix a problem than they do about the actual quality of what has been presented.

Yeah, I can speak about quality real quick and like what it is and what it isn't. So when you say, like, they care more about process than quality, that is absolutely the case, but I do think so. Let me tell you what is happening with the quality now and then. We can also discuss what it would take to change that and if it even could be changed. So what happens now is, each month you submit, imagine, like, basically, like a one pager, kind of document, like it can be on one page, and word essentially, where you describe what's going to be in your course. You describe the learning objectives you have to cite research that you're including in the course, right? And if what is on that one page document passes muster with their staff, because ASHA has staff that's going through it, they'll let it go through. And I do have confidence that, for example, if I submitted something, or anybody submitted something, that's like, I love Facilitated Communication, and I'm going to tell everybody they should use it with all their clients, like, if it was that blatant, Asha would reject it. I know they would. However, the issue comes into play, how different what somebody can say on paper is and what's actually in the 1234, hour course. I mean, you could easily get facilitated communication through the ASHA system as, like, a really good example, where if what you're saying on the page doesn't cause any red flags, they never know what actually happens in the course. So when we ask if, like Asha CEOs, are higher quality than others, I would say yes, but very marginally Yes, only because there is a little step that you have to go through in order to prove quality. So to say that they're not higher quality than anything else out there would be false. But are they a high enough bar of quality that we think that the way the system works is adequate? I mean, no, like to me, the ashes CE process isn't like is pretty weak for quality. But what kind of labor would it take to make the bar higher? A lot of labor and a lot of expense. Says, go ahead. Jeanette.

Before you go with that I just want to give an example from my own teaching history in working for medbridge, same process, because, you know, they require that when I either propose a course or I'm asked to teach a course, because sometimes I'm invited and they say, can you do this? And sometimes I already have something in my head, like you said, that first step is filling out theirs is a little more than two pages, but part of that is providing five art evidence based articles that I am going to include in my course to support my content, and then even rating them to say, you know, they have a rating scale and what type of evidence was this? This process for medbridge, one of my most popular, is supporting patient choice and diet waiver. We proposed that from proposal to release. It was more than a year and a half because we did so much back end work in interviews with lawyers, and it was so much stuff that I can tell you. By the end of it, I have no idea what five articles I told them were going to be included in course. And I have caught myself before saying, Oh, shoot. I said I'm gonna and sometimes I'm gonna say right here, sometimes I've gone back to make sure I've incorporated. And sometimes, like the waiver course, it is such a high quality. Course, it should be required watching for all people who treat swallowing disorders. Did I go back and look to make sure that my colleague, Pam Smith and I included those five articles? I can't say we did. Yeah, and so that, like you said, Can you push things through? Yeah, as long as you put the five articles that they want to see after that again, we did that a year and a half later, we had a product that maybe had nothing to do with our original proposal. And it's sort of on the presenter to make sure that you're ethical and saying you're going to do what you say you're going to do. But there's no checks and balances to make sure that's the case.

I think that, like for me, the take home point isn't that like, she needs to add a whole bunch more labor hours into making sure to check, Spot check things, because I know what kind of labor it takes to put out high quality products, and it's insanely freaking expensive, and nobody would pay for it. SLBS wouldn't pay for it. The businesses wouldn't pay for it. Would be way too labor expensive to do all the quality checks that a business and a presenter should have already done in the first place, on their on their end, right? So I, like, in my mind, the dream isn't, could they make the quality bar higher? I mean, if somebody wants to try to tackle that and can figure out a good way to do it, go for it. I really think that it instead is, rather than assuming that we need to pay someone else to tell us if something is worthy of like consuming and is good quality information, unfortunately, needs to fall back on the individual themselves, which I know is like, painful, but it kind of does, and you need to just like, understand, like, the track record of various companies that you're consuming information from, and do they tend to have good quality checks in place? Yes or no. You know, I don't think it's an ASHA thing. I don't think the quality is an ASHA thing. I think that's something that has to fall on the shoulders of the businesses and individuals producing the content in the first place to prove to the SLP community that they're doing what they need to do to not screw it up, and then the SLP community individually holding them responsible as informed consumers, essentially, yeah, I don't think anything else would work.

And it really circles to that point that people assume Asha CEUs are better, yeah, having to provide those five articles, which, again, you may or may not look at as you're writing your course, it doesn't mean it's going to be a bad course, but that bar is low. And I have shared this before on this podcast, and I'll keep saying it in a talk that I did at this point, probably a year and a half ago, about consumerism and speech pathology. I said in my talk, Asha is not protecting us. And the audible gasp in the room was shocking to me. And that's the first, you know, as as the story of fix SLP, and the things that I've done in in my career has evolved. It was the first time I was like, Wow. I didn't really say anything wrong. I actually told the truth. But because of perception of the people in our community that they hold Asha to this higher standard, and they hold these Asha CEUs to a higher standard, people were actually offended. I mean, someone in that I had students in that talk, someone after the talk, went up to my students and said I would never go to a university with a fact team member like her and those students went and complained to the dean that I was putting their accreditation on the line for what I said in my course. Come on now and then. Somebody else proceeded to call my chair to warn her about me. Wonderful, the truth, yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah. As our field has a very, like paternalistic relationship with ASHA where, like a lot, like a lot, is we're assuming that we're being protected like sweet little baby girls and somebody is taking care of us. And because we are paying a fee and because we're a member of the club, we are being protected, taken care of. It's all take it's they've got it. We can just worry about going on with the rest of our day. You know what I mean? At least that's how I view it. It's, it's, it's an interesting relationship. Um, what so? So what is the point of Asha ce providership existing and like, what's upholding it? That's probably where we should go next, right?

So, you know, as you and I have bulldozed this conversation probably for a solid half hour already, maybe we should let Preston jump in.

I don't think I'll be able to contribute to that segue, which I thought was actually quite excellent. But I am curious, what's the hot ticket right now in the CE world? What are what are people really gravitating and gobbling up that they want?

Oh, so I'm a former pediatric SLP, and like Gestalt, language processing is really popular. That's a really big thing. It's actually kind of fun, actually, because at so at the informed SLP, because, like, our homepage is basically like Google, where there's a search bar at the top. You type in what you want, and stuff appears down below right, and we're actually able to take data on what SLPs search for and compare that to what's actually appearing in the science. And it can be kind of fascinating, because SLPs are very SLPs are very likely to if something kind of becomes a hot topic and everybody's talking about it, it appears in our search bar, just like incessantly, and that kind of changes every two or three years, you know, like there was a phase where selective mutism was like a hot topic, and we were seeing tons and tons and tons of searches on that. But our field science doesn't follow like trends that are happening on the ground as quickly and quite the same way. So sometimes there just isn't science on things that people are actually searching, which is kind of interesting. But yeah.

So stepping back from the business side of it, I hear, you know, like if I was to do one of those word clouds after listening to you organization database, these are, these are big words in your world. So I'm curious. At home, are you disorganized?

Yeah

Really?

It's even worse at home. I had um, staff stay with me one time because we were doing like, a retreat, and so we all kind of, like, did this, like, you know, stay at my house and work thing for a while, and one of my staff was making fun of me afterwards, because she was like, it was like, it was really interesting seeing you, like, in your natural environment, and how you would, like, brush crumbs off the counter that didn't exist, like, constantly as you're moving through the space. I was, yeah, no, I'm I'm that crazy in all aspects.

But that's a that's a good thing. Okay, we all have our strengths. So

Yeah, it's a strength and a weakness. You know, ticket for what it is.

So, Jeanette, you want to know about that motivation behind this? Huh? On the ASHA approved CEUs, you were saying?

Yeah. Meredith said you asked the question before I pass the ball to Preston.

That's okay, yeah, uh, yeah. So, like, you just, you know what? What's the point of the ASHA CE provider, thing existing. And more importantly, what's upholding it? Because we can decide that there's a thing that we're like, you know, I don't know if this needs to exist or not, but then the question is, why does it continue to exist? Okay, in my opinion, the two major things upholding it is how easy it is for the top 50% of businesses in our field to do it. You know what I mean? Like, when I tell you, this isn't a pain point for me, that means, like, if I'm a business owner who isn't paying attention to the impact on our field and the impact on SLPs and what things maybe shouldn't, shouldn't be doing, just from an ethical perspective, like it is a non issue. It just isn't expensive for us, really, right? So that's problem number one is that, like, at least half of our fields business says who are offering continuing ed or, like, not a problem. So what does that do for them? That basically puts them in a club where it eliminates other competition, it eliminates noise, and it reduces the number of people who appear in a place like CE find. Which CE find? I think the URL is CE find.com, something like that, where you can search all the courses that are from Asha approved continuing ed providers. So like the people who are participating in the system, it's just, it's just kind. A non issue, and if anything, we have only perks from it, okay, because of the reasons I said. But then SLPs are upholding it too in multiple ways. One is the misperception that they're much higher quality when they're really only marginally, marginally higher quality, if that. The other is the perception that they have to take Asha CEUs. So when you have SLPs, like, demanding, demanding, demanding, like, I'm not going to buy your product unless you're an ASHA CE provider, all it does is pushes businesses into that category. So part of it is the SLP, misunderstanding and pressure on all of us as business owners. Part of it is just little things like the ASHA CE registry, that's only $25 a year, you know. And again,

I think it's $38 now.

Oh, did it go up?

It's been going up.

Okay, well, I paid it was 25

I think, if you're a member and non member, but it is not, I know for sure, it's not 25 anymore. Okay,

yep, all right, so we'll need to just fact check that. But regardless, there is a massive number of people who think that that is worth it and like that system. So what they're doing is they're paying for automation, which means that they don't have to worry as much about keeping track of their own PDF certificates and keeping their own like Excel spreadsheet on their, you know, desktop that tracks all of their continuing ed hours, because Asha does it for them. And if you're in the ASHA CE registry, it's also a whole lot less likely that you're going to be audited. I would say you pretty much can't be audited, because if ASHA has all your records, what are they going to audit? It's just a pass. And so it so from the SLP perspective, if you're looking at them as an individual, there's a lot of individuals that love the ASHA CE registry, and our system dumps directly into the ASHA CE registry. Right? All of the ASHA CE providers. It just communicates right, directly. So that's what's upholding it. That's what's upholding the entire thing is it would have like, like, if we decided that we didn't like the system. Those are all the things that would have to be broken

on the big providers or you but the more I hear about this with that, you know, very high entry cost for somebody who start up the way this thing just kind of continues to flow every year, or these big companies churning these out, some of them that are good quality, but like you said, some of them that may not be as good as people think. With that label, I kind of go back to our previous conversation with ins or with Ian ESSA, which is it sort of promotes that group think mentality when it's that same thing, and it's not really friendly to startups. And you know, people who want to come in at from an come at it from a different angle

yeah, it does. It's a, it's a, it's a pay to play game. And for the most part, I do not like pay to play games, but I also think that it's important to recognize that we're all playing pay to play games right now. And when are we okay with it? And when are we not just follow me for a second on this logic. This might be a little triggering from some people, but we're doing it as a thought exercise, and we're gonna try to let it not be triggering, use it as a thought exercise, and then loop back to it like if you were to take a sheet of paper and on one side write good, and on one side write bad, and divide it down the middle so that you can put things on both sides, then at the top of that sheet of paper, write down all the pay to play games you're actively engaged in or have been engaged in as an SLP, so one of them would be, and I wanted to be I statements, because the more you write them as I statements, the more you realize you do this. You just don't think you do it. You know, I paid $50,000 to get to become an SLP, I pay what is it per year right now? Jeanette to maintain ASHA membership, and Cs?

it's 250 for to be a certified member. A certified member means you're a member of Asha, and you hold the CCC. I'll tell you what, with all the with all the checked boxes that they've already checked for me, it's $395 if I don't uncheck anything.

Yeah, you've got to uncheck the things that you don't actually want. So let's just call it 300 ish, whatever I pay $300 per year to Asha as part of my you know, continued practice as being an SLP. And start to think about all the things that you're engaging in that are pay to play games. Think about what's good and bad about them. Think about what's equitable and not about them. So like Jeanette, you're into talking about how, like the ASHA CE provider game doesn't allow the small people in grad school doesn't allow the small people in you know what I mean? Let's not pretend as though we aren't all actively engaging in pay to play games to a certain extent, what humans natural tendency to do is to be okay with the hurdles they've already jumped and the fees they've already paid to get to where they are, but to be upset about the ones that they might have to pay next to get to the next place they want to be. Now that's the part of what I wanted to say that's going to be real triggering to some people, because they're going to be like what she's such a. Like, how to touch a jerk. What is she even saying? But if you go through the good bad list, like I'm saying, and really think to yourself, Okay, why am I okay with this? I'm genuinely okay with it from like, an ethical perspective, I think it should continue in our field. Why do I think it's okay that we have to get our master's degree in order to practice as SLPs? Because a lot of people are going to say, I would never want to break that. That that has to happen. So then you have to tell yourself, why? Because it helps with making sure SLPs are trained, because it helps with consumer protection. It helps make sure that anybody off the street can't say that there's an SLP, and then engage a client in therapy that harms them, right? And then when you start to see the reasons when pay to play games might be appropriate versus not, you start to get yourself a little list, and then you can look at other things with, in my opinion, more clarity, and be like, Okay, so the reasons that we might want to have a pay to play game, does the ASHA CE provider thing, the whole situation, does that fit in? Which ways does it fit in? Which ways does it not? How high do fees have to be before I say this is harming our field versus it's a personal choice thing. So who cares? You know what I mean? These are really complex problems that, in my opinion, don't actually have simple answers, you know? So that's your thought exercise for the day. And if you can actually do it, if you can actually be someone who can, like, engage in it and start to problem solve things, reach out to Jeanette, because you would probably be a really good volunteer, yeah? Or come to me too, because I'll hire you. If you can actually problem solve things like that.

Yeah, I'll hire you for free.

Well, and considering my own story arc as an SLP, you know, I'm out here working in a sniff for years, and I'm paying my dues. I'm, you know, just sending that in every year, because that was a pay to play that I bought into. This is what we're supposed to do. And I think for a lot of people, they may go through their whole career, and they may never have that point where all of a sudden they they pull on that rope and think, What am I getting here? And for me, it was, you know, easily, it was 2020, I hadn't, I think maybe once or twice I'd ever reached out to Asha, and finally I did. There was nobody at the other end of that rope. It was, you know, that was a tough year for everyone. But when you call them and you say, Look, you know, I've got a rehab company I'm working for that's accepted a $5.8 million PPP loan for payroll, and when my two weeks came up that I had to be quarantined, sorry, you know, you just have to take a pay hit it, you know that was. And you call them and they say, well, we just had to refer you back to your state association. I'm like, Why the hell am I paying you?

Right, right, right. Ooh, I can see why they didn't take that one on. That's a legal nightmare.

It's tough. No, I you know. And that's the thing, is that, were they wrong to send me back to that state association, not necessarily from a you know, results standpoint at that moment, but you know, when you're getting all the leader and you're getting all these communications and it's silent on all these issues, whether it's, you know, productivity, working space, stagnant, you know, stagnant wages, and then, you know, we run into really a tough moment for the profession, and it's business as usual.

right, right

Time to pay your fees. Everybody show up, like, ring the bell, That's when I said, You know what? You can keep it.

Yeah, that's, that's why I think one of the biggest problems in our field related to Asha is both the perception slash reality that you have to pay them no matter what, because, you know what that does to a business destroys their ability to feel accountable to their customers. Yeah, you know. And so, like, that's That's unfortunate. Like, I can see a lot of reasons why I would want Asha to continue to exist, but the thing that I most hope for that can become stripped from it is SLPs feeling like they have to pay and everybody thinking that what we're doing here is required, because I don't think that's good for internal decisions that happen within a business, like for me, like if, if everybody was required to pay for the informed SLP, because I somehow was able to, like, make that happen by communicating with states and getting in it with a state licensure and being like, you know, I would never lie in an SLP practice if they didn't know the research. And one of the best ways to know the research is by database, like if I were somehow able to pull that off, and if 100% of SLPs were required to pay for our ebp database, like that would set me up for a situation where I don't really have to listen to SLPs. I don't have to uphold quality. I don't have to do what they say, because they're paying me, no matter what. Like that, the types of situations where, like Jeanette said, you don't have the autonomy to make decisions, not only isn't good for you as an individual, but in my opinion, like destroys leadership. Decision making within the organization or company that you're paying, it just gives them too many reasons and pathways to not pay attention to what SLPs actually need most and just continue on with what's you know, what they think is best.

yeah, and what they appear to think is best right now is the value of the CCC. That's the language that we see from them a lot, but it's their perceived value, not our perceived value,

exactly. And that's what I think is really critical. That's not happening right now, is, if you really pay attention to SLPs, there's actually some recurring themes that pop up that pretty much all SLPs, most want support on, or most want efforts driven to. Yeah, I'm not confident that I've seen efforts toward most of those

I want to point towards something that you said way earlier is the automation of tracking. CEUs, just like informed jobs, I have been following another project from the idea to production, and that is a CEU tracker. One of the problems that we hear from SLPs is I'm too lazy to do it myself, or I'm too disorganized to do it myself, or I don't want to think about it and do it myself. And that was a problem in our field, or like you might call a pain point. So there is a business that I spoke with about us needing a solution to the ASHA CEU tracker, which, by the way I looked up, the cost is $28 if you are an ASHA member, and I believe it's 38 if you are not an ASHA member. So that's the cost. Now, what is a solution? How can we automate this in some way for maybe cheaper so people don't have to pay that price. And let me tell you who came up with something. It's speech therapy. Pd.com speech therapy. Pd.com had something like that, but you had to subscribe to their platform to have access to it. And so recently, they have rebranded. They have done a lot of things with their company, just some really cool things they've done, but something that they have done is built out a CE tracker that is open to everyone for free.

You're kidding me. So what does it track, though?

so I'm looking at it right now because I actually do have an account. And you can go onto their website and create an account. That doesn't mean you're paying to subscribe to to get CEUs. But anyone can use this. So you set up your account, you do have to upload your certificates, because obviously they don't have the ability to, you know, communicate with the informed SLP, back and forth. Like, totally, yeah. But this is a step in the right direction. Yeah. So there is very easy there is a button that says Upload, and then you upload your certificate, and it will give you a transcript from the dates that you generate, just like the ASHA CEU Tracker will. And here's the best part, if you don't pay for the ASHA CEU tracker, and someone accidentally reports your stuff to them, they'll start tracking it for you. You just can't see it. But then what do they do? They send you a fake invoice that looks like you have to pay it or you're going to lose your CEUs. And all of the language is very well worded and very misleading, and something that we've never announced just because of how this year has gone, something that has happened as a result of our movement is that they now send an additional letter with their false invoice to say you don't actually have to pay this. So while Asha will never out loud say that we have influenced them in any way they're paying attention, and they now send a letter that's and, you know, maybe their lawyer, they're a big, fancy, expensive lawyer, say, Yeah, this is probably Yeah. You actually can be doing Yeah, but they do still send the invoice, the fake invoice that just has a companion letter that you may or may not read. Yeah. You can't print the transcript unless you are paying them. I don't know if you stop paying them. If you can print transcripts for previous years or not from years you were paying I bet you can't. So the CE tracker from speech therapy, pd.com you can put in the dates. You can print a transcript. So if you happen to be audited. Provided through your state or through Asha. If you're continuing to pay for the CS, all you have to do is put in the dates that you want it for. Press click it will give you a transcript, and you can send that in. And so I think it is the closest thing that we have seen, or at least that someone has pointed out to me to the ASHA CE tracker, because then you start getting it into these expenses of your business, communicating with them and them tracking

Yeah, yeah. But again, good as it'll get. It can't get better without it getting expensive.

Yeah, it's giving us the autonomy. And so what I would say is, when you finish, sometimes you finish a CEU, and you immediately get a certificate, drag and drop it to your desktop and upload it there, and then you're done. You don't even have to save the certificate anymore, because they will do it for you, and they're doing it for all of us for free, and I think that is so important, and Bravo to them. I've been wanting a solution, just like informed jobs. How do we know if they're asking for the CCC, you're going to do that. Okay, so now, what's the solution to the CE tracker? It's this company, yeah, each therapy, ppd.com, go set it up. It's there. It's free, and it will track it for you, and you can get your transcript. I'm very excited about it. Until this point, my employer has paid for that CE tracker, so I've used it from Asha, but not because I've paid for it, because you just throw it in if you're if your employer is paying for it, why not? Well, I'm not in academia anymore, and this year I have to pay all those expenses. I'm not renewing that thing. I'm going through, and I'm going to print every transcript for every year. And moving forward, I will be using speech therapy. Pd.com, because with my ADHD, I'm not keeping track. We're lucky if I show up to a meeting. So just like I said, as soon as I'm done with the course, or as soon as that that certificate gets emailed to me, right in that moment, I will upload it, and then I'm done, and I don't have to track it.

I love it. Yeah, I'm so glad they did that. That's awesome.

Yeah. Just to wrap it all up. The point is, and hopefully, over the next two weeks, we're really going to help people understand the professional development hours are the same as CEUs. They're just interchangeable words to describe the same thing that not even Asha requires Asha approved CEUs for maintenance of their CCC. In many states, you might need them. I don't. I'll have to go look. I don't even think there is a state that requires exclusively Asha approved CEOs. I know California has some weird things where you have to choose from a list. Michigan actually has a category where it has to be pdhs that are not Asha approved. In Michigan, you have to do a chunk of hours. And I forget what it is. It's five or 10. It's not a lot, but it is an amount where it cannot be Asha approved. It has to be outside of the ASHA approved CEU category. So there are different things. And then, like in Ohio, I said, it's wide open. You can do whatever you want, as long as you have the proof that you did it in some way. So pay attention to your state. And we have all of that linked up at fix slp.com, right now. It's, I believe, under Resources for SLPs, but you can go to our website and look at specifically what is required by your state. We've we've pulled it out. Yep, it is. It's under Resources for SLPs, CEU requirements for states. You click that, and it takes you, takes you to a color coded map where you can look at the top of that. You can view the spreadsheet where we keep all of that. So also, if you find a mistake, this is a living, breathing document, we, by no means, are like, No, we are right, and we will not change it. All we ask is that regulation. You cannot come to us and say, well, in my state, it's required the first thing out of my mouth is going to be, I need you to send me that regulation. Because we don't go by hearsay. We go by the actual thing that's written on the actual website from your actual state licensing board. And we want to provide that to everybody too, because you shouldn't be believing us. You should be doing your own research and fact checking what we say. So this has been a huge undertaking, a crowdsource effort as well. So always. Thank you to the people who have contributed to that, but you can go just fix slp.com, Reese's for resources for SLPs, go look at the map in the next three to six months, where hopefully you run it rolling out a website, where it will be much more user friendly. But you know that costs money, so for now, it's living on a spreadsheet that you link to. But yeah, just let us know. And oh, I'm not always fast about making updates, but I do have a folder, so when I sit down and do it, we'll make those updates if you've given us the correct information. So you can go take a look. Hopefully that starts to flesh out some of this. You don't need the ASHA approved CEUs, and as long as we pay into it, as long as we pay for that tracker, as long as we keep demanding that people, that companies, provide this service for us, it's going to keep the cost high. And I know I asked Meredith to come prepared with numbers today, but I'm sitting here thinking going, literally, going through this process right now where we want to offer an intimate, small CEU fees course, introductory fees course, with, you know, 10 to 15 people, maybe, and I have the numbers right in front of me. So maybe once we get to the end of this the course, I maybe I'll record a little adjunctive pod, or do a live or something where I talk about what those numbers look like, what we had to charge to pay for our expenses, and what we could have charged if we didn't have to offer the ASHA CEUs. Because even though we we couldn't become a provider ourselves, and I would not have, we still have to pay for that expense. We'll be putting this out there in our content, I believe, too. But Asha has now, as a result, I think of fixed SLP, and the light we're shining on this now, I believe, very recently, Meredith, maybe you know, Asha, is now telling CEU providers like you to not pass the cost of becoming a CE provider. Onto the SLP. Did you see that?

I not, no, but I'm not the person who read. I'm not like we have a staff member who reads all that

someone has sent us that communication. So now, as a result of this movement, I think, I can't say for sure, but this didn't start until the last year where we're saying this increases the cost of CEUs. If you're an ASHA CE provider, Asha is now saying, Well, don't pass this cost on to your customer. What?

Take it out of your savings account, please.

What? I mean, come on, that's not even reasonable business, like, what? No, I can't. Okay. So this has been great. Meredith, thank you for sharing about the informed SLP and informed jobs. I can't wait to talk to you more about that. Where can people go to find both of your businesses? Tell them again.

The informed SLP is the informedslp.com and informed jobs is informedjobs.com Okay, keep it clean.

Well, thanks for being here. We really appreciate it

Glad to see you all happy thinking everyone!

what do you think Preston?

I think that when it comes to an organization that's thinking about the leading ways to get the in demand clinical needs out there for finding out what's on the cutting edge, this is where it is, I think, and she's got the data to prove it. She knows precisely where we're plugged in, where we're going, and I love that. I love that forward thinking, knowing that in a couple of years, I may have patients coming to me that want this, and when I'm ready to go to it, I have a very outstanding cutting edge and a little bit outside the box too, from just the traditional academia world, because she's not afraid to engage with people of all different types, if it's evidence based, she's there, yeah, yeah, it's great. It's a good, good tool. And I'm not.

I know that this was about PDH and CEUs, but I cannot wait to bring her back to talk about informed jobs when it's live.

Yeah, that that is because, wow, we've all been in that jungle of just that indeed.com. Years ago, I got called in for a job that I thought this sounds great, and I get there and they say, oh, no, you know, this is just on the listing. We really didn't have anything. It's like a mirage in the desert. And we're busy, you know, we have a lot of lives, and to get dressed up and go show up and, you know, just get kind of rolled like that. It's got to change. And that's, that's Meredith, that she finds that issue and says, How can I make a better mousetrap? And that's taking the SLP world and that entrepreneurial world, and it's meshed together, and she plays quite a balance of those. Yeah, it's magic to watch.

Yep. So the top of the episode, we read the review, we talked to you about the money stuff. And I think that's it. I think that's it. We're gonna we're gonna do more CEU, PDH stuff next week. So please tune back in. We have more stuff coming. Keep watching our content. Bump, share, love, like, follow all the things, and we'll see you next week. Thanks for fixing it!