Scott Salathe, PsyD is a clinical psychologist trained in adult, couple, and family therapy. He runs a private practice based in Kentucky.
Scott’s goal is to empower his patients to make healthy choices for their long-term emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being.
He applies evidence-based practices as well as empathy and common sense to help people identify unhealthy patterns that hold people back from experiencing a more healthy and meaningful life.
We recently spoke to Scott about how Paubox has helped him keep in touch with various groups of people during the COVID-19 outbreak. He explained it this way:
“Number one: my clients for sure. [Email has] definitely been a way that I’ve connected with them, and let them know that I’m still alive and well, and making a shift to telehealth immediately.
“Number two: colleagues, sharing information with them in terms of getting up to speed on telehealth.
“And number three: kind of the larger professional community of therapists nationally, and even internationally.”
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Industry |
Mental health |
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Send HIPAA compliant, encrypted email by default |
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Without Paubox, it would have been much more difficult for Scott to tell his 50 patients how they can maintain a continuity of care with him during the coronavirus outbreak.
If he wasn’t a Paubox Email Suite Plus customer, “I suppose I may have had to call them and leave them messages and play phone tag with people. That would have been infuriating, and could have lasted weeks,” he said.
Instead, he was able to send a HIPAA compliant email to all his patients alerting them to changes to his practice.
Scott uses email whenever possible. “It’s very hard to answer the phone and return phone calls, especially being a small private practitioner,” Scott explained, “so email is my primary way of communicating with people.”
Scott emails patients between sessions as well. “We can share as much or as little as we want, without any fear, which is liberating,” he said.
In addition, Scott has a few clients who want detailed feedback after their sessions. Because he uses Paubox, “we can share some really confidential clinical material about what we talked about,” he noted. “That’s not something I felt comfortable doing on non-encrypted email before. But it is something that I’m comfortable doing now.”
Using Paubox has added additional revenue opportunities for Scott.
He has patients that “want to use [email] extensively,” Scott said. “We have a little fee based on how much time I spend. So if they want to send me a novel, and they want me to write them a long response, there’s a fee for that.”
Paubox also allows Scott to speak in more detail with other providers about patient referrals, since he can include protected health information (PHI) in his emails. “It gives us an alternative to phone or fax. Who ever faxes anymore?” he said.
“It’s really hard to get another professional on the phone,” he went on. “Generally you’re not going to call them at 9pm either, but you might send them an email at 9pm or midnight.”
“Now, I have to do a little educating of other therapists that [my email] is secure,” he added. “This is encrypted. You can say a few things. You don’t need to write something cryptic me . . . It’s safe.”