Telehealth and Captioning/text box- Americans With Disability ACT
Answered
I have a client did not have any hearing problems when we started therapy. She noticed her hearing was getting worse and found out she has a tumor that is causing her to lose her hearing. She is now considered hearing impaired and may lose all of her hearing.
So, here is my question: Considering the laws with the ADA and providing resources for individuals who are hearing impaired, I believe that SP may want to look further into providing captioning during live tele-health sessions or at the least a chat box. I have tried a variety of things - using messaging that SP provides, but that does not work well for fuidity of sessions. I will sometimes share my screen and write what I am saying into a word document and she can read that. But that is VERY time consuming.
There must be someway SP can implement some form of supplemental assistance for those who are hearing impaired. PLEASE HELP!!
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I am a Certified Hearing Specialist! I have run into the same problem with clients! I am so glad you brought this up. I believe "real-time captioning" should be an option. It costs for sure. TTY is a less optimal option because a third party is hearing the conversation. Help SP! Is a talk-to-text feature available?
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Hi Laila and Claudia, thank you for bringing this to our attention! We're always interested in improving accessibility to our platform. Although we don't currently have a Closed Captioning function in our Telehealth feature, this is something we could consider in a future enhancement. I'll definitely bring up your points in our next Product Meeting. In the meantime, please add your comments and vote on this feature request: Add Closed Captioning for Telehealth. As for an integrated Chat feature within Telehealth, our Product Team is already looking into ways we can incorporate this into Telehealth, please continue to provide us with feedback on how you'd like to see this feature implemented, here: Telehealth Chat.
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Real-time captioning is an ADA issue. It's not a luxury add-on. First question how do you use a third-party captioner. Do you have an API and token and set of how-to instructions for a third-party captioner to use? Secondly what exactly is your roadmap and how soon is this likely to happen?
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HI Laurie,
I am sorry you are dealing with this. I never got a reasonable answer from SP so I suggest you contact them directly with a new inquiry. In the meantime, would TTY be the answer? Does your client use a captioned phone....I doubt it since you said she was visually impaired. It doesn't seem that real-time captioning would be your answer either.
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Hi Everyone -
I am the OP and posted this in the Solo Best Practices Community Forum as well. I wrote an update today on there. I will copy and paste my response onto here, but that thread has additional feedback which may be helpful.
I tried copy and paste the link to the thread below; however, I am unsure if it will take you there.
And, no, this issue hasn't been resolved.
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Hi guys! I am the OP. I still use SP but unfortunately have had to go to a 3rd party platform due to this issue. I loved the idea of the ease having all features being on one platform (SP) but this issue - along with a few others with the Telehealth feature has resulted in me completely switching over to the third party platform for Telehealth and paying extra money for it. I feel SP doesn’t always prioritize specific issues with the platform as they should, however, I do stick with them because in the end it is simpler (seriously) for me to use this platform for billing, documentation, appointment reminders, calendar stuff, etc than other EHRs I have looked into.
SP 100% should take care of this issue and there is no excuse that they haven’t by this point.
Just wanted to share my position on this!
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