OT Potential Podcast | Occupational Therapy CEUs

Around 4% of the population will experience a psychotic disorder in their lifetime, and about 100,000 youth and young adults in the US experience a first episode of psychosis each year. When it comes to supporting these individuals, the research is clear. Early intervention after that first episode is both clinically effective and cost-effective.

In fact, major efforts have been underway in the US to establish early psychosis programs. The number of coordinated specialty care programs grew from about 59 in 2014 to an estimated 381 programs in 2022, operating in all 50 states.

Broad best practices are well established, including early...

In the United States, therapy professionals are mostly educated in silos.

So it’s no wonder that when we get into the real world, we often struggle with interprofessional collaboration.

The answer is simple, and medicine, nursing, and pharmacy have already embraced it: interprofessional education.

But if this is the way forward, why has therapy been slow to adopt it? Will we lose our distinct value if we learn alongside other professions? Does it actually work, and if so, how do we measure that? And what does it look like in practice?

...

At the heart of rehab therapy is often behavior change. That powerful lever is how therapy is able to deliver such long-term, life-altering results.

But let's be honest—it's also hard.

I know I, for one, have sat in a therapy office as a patient, pledging to do my home exercise program, and then totally failed to do it.

Motivational interviewing is an evidence-based approach that helps us get at the "why" behind what makes behavior change so difficult. It surfaces the real challenges so the therapist and patient can work through them to...

As we've covered on the podcast, the world is heading toward a dementia crisis. The number of people living with dementia is projected to nearly triple by 2050, and low- and middle-income countries will be hit hardest.

But there is real hope for changing that trajectory: prevention.

The 2024 Lancet Commission estimates that nearly half of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed by addressing 14 modifiable risk factors, including hearing loss, hypertension, physical inactivity, and social isolation. And our guest's research points to something striking: nearly half of individual differences in Alzheimer's risk may be...

More than 2.4 billion people around the globe live with a health condition that would benefit from rehabilitation, and more than 1 billion are living with a mental health condition. But how do they find the right therapist among the roughly 2.8 million OTs and PTs out there, not to mention SLPs and mental health professionals?

The answer is pretty obvious: marketing.

But in our busy clinical lives, we tend to overlook the importance of this business activity. And we certainly don't spend enough time thinking about how it could drive better outcomes. We know that therapeutic alliance...

For as long as I've been an OT, I've been hearing about occupational therapy's advocacy to be recognized as behavioral health providers.

This is frankly a little confusing, since OT has deep roots in mental health care — and many of us became OTs because of the unique way the profession holistically considers mental health and physical health, and how the two intersect in everyday function.

Things honestly become even more confusing when you start to dig into what exactly it means to be recognized as a behavioral health provider. What doors does that open to us...

On one hand, it truly feels like we are on track for health technology to transform healthcare as we know it.

On the other hand, we have to weigh the reality that many health tech solutions end up abandoned.

This is especially true of consumer-facing health tech. Some of the latest research shows that around 70% of users abandon health tech apps within 100 days.

Rehabilitation technology fares better — largely because of the clinician in the loop, who prescribes, fits, and supports the technology toward a defined therapeutic goal. But abandonment is still real: even wi...

Healthcare has many challenges right now, but so many of them stem back to one looming global reality:

By 2050, the number of people on our planet over age 65 is projected to double. It’s almost hard to wrap your head around the financial impact, the caregiving demands, and just how profoundly this shift will alter society.

Luckily, the latest systematic research is crystal clear: to truly support aging in place, we need multidomain interventions that target the physical, cognitive, and social dimensions of healthy aging.

Even better? We already have a health workforce wh...

Over 53 million people in the U.S. provide unpaid caregiving services. That's a stunning 1 in 6 people.

The complex role of caregiving can entail everything from behavior management, symptom detection, and nutritional guidance to medication administration and transfer skills.

As you can imagine, insufficient caregiver training can lead to increased patient risks for safety and injury, worsening symptoms, loss of function, and higher healthcare utilization costs.

And for the caregivers themselves—unmet training needs are associated with higher anxiety, depression, burden, and lower self-esteem.

Prior to 2024, healthcare workers like OTs and PTs fa...

The 2027 Physician Fee Schedule signals a continued restructuring of clinician payment-redistributing funds towards primary care and behavioral health while providing signals for what's coming next.

OTs and PTs can no longer sit on the sidelines. 

As straightforward, low-complexity care increasingly moves toward digital pathways and as patients increasingly access care through digital front doors, we must advocate that CMS properly values the high-value cognitive work and in-person, complex clinical reasoning and officially integrates therapy as the missing third pillar of the primary care team. 

This year's proposed rule is a critical opportunity to pr...

The latest clinical practice guideline for occupational therapy for autistic people across the lifespan urges us to shift away from deficit models toward neurodiversity-affirming, strengths-based care.

But, what does this look like in practice?

We know from the research that there are barriers at every level to delivering the type of support we aspire to- from rigid service silos to inconsistent legislation. 

That’s why I’m so excited today to welcome to the podcast someone who is charting a new way forward: Samantha Valasek, OTD, OTR/L Director of OT Services, at Spect...

As we’ve interviewed expert clinicians on the podcast, clear trends have emerged. These clinicians have two things in common: 

I’m pretty sure they do this- because this is what they’ve discovered works. But, I’ve never really seen this approach studied or discussed in research…until now.

I was honestly flabbergasted to hear one of the most prominent rehab researchers in the world, talking about these two things, in his paper  Many Paths to Recovery: The C...

When you look at the intersection of vision and reading in schools, the gaps are impossible to ignore.

Consider the data:

To make matters worse, standard school vision screenings frequently miss the functional vision deficits—such as convergence, accommodation, and visual perception issues—that directly impact a student's ability to sustain near-work in the classroom.

As occupational therapists, understanding how vision impacts functional tasks...

Only in this past year did it come on my radar that some therapy clinics are offering prenatal therapy. While I can personally relate to the desire to have a therapist guide you through such a complex stage of health, I thought that because it isn't offered widely, the evidence base would probably be weak.

I couldn't have been more wrong. The evidence for prenatal prevention therapy is robust for improving:

Pelvic health. Pelvic floor muscle training during pregnancy reduces urinary incontinence by 28% and cuts the risk of severe perineal tears in half (Zhang et...

The rapid rise of AI chat presenting as therapists has spurred a reaction to differentiate what AI can do versus the work of a licensed therapist.

This is causing many people to look more closely at the question:

What Is Therapy?

In today’s discussion, we’ll both look back at how therapy has been understood historically and look forward to cutting-edge research like “interpersonal neural synchrony,” which is being studied across therapy professions and perhaps paving the way for a unified definition of therapy and its biological mechanisms. Understanding therapy in a neu...

It’s hard to overstate how important it is for OTs and PTs to understand the new value-based care models.

But, let’s be honest—they are an overwhelming and confusing alphabet soup (TEAM, LEAD, GUIDE, ACO REACH), and that’s just the acronyms.

For OTs and PTs, understanding these models will be the difference between being embedded in the healthcare team of the future—where we deliver highly valued care—and falling into obscurity while our patients receive sub-par care.
Luckily, we have a master at demystifying the complex, Dana Strauss, back on the podcast...

We all know that documentation is a heavy burden for therapists. But home health therapists arguably face one of the heaviest loads, with mandated OASIS reporting layered on top of standard clinical documentation — a dual requirement unique to this setting.

They also face challenges that clinic-based therapists rarely encounter: coordinating care across disciplines — physicians, nurses, and other therapists — often without shared documentation systems, as well as navigating privacy considerations and internet instability when documenting in patients’ homes.

But, as we’ve already discussed around outpatient EHRs, there are changes on the horizon. In this discussion, we’ll zoom...

It feels like in every practice area, the importance of the vagus nerve is being talked about.

But nowhere is it being researched as much as vagal nerve stimulation post-stroke. And the initial results are promising — as long as it is paired with rehabilitation. The stimulation sets the body up for new motor learning, but then the rehab actually creates the change.

In this beginner's course, I'm excited to talk to Sarah Blair, OTR/L  from Vivistim about what she has learned about this relatively new intervention and what generalist OTs need to know about thi...

In talking to therapy start-ups this year, I've heard a common stumbling block: Credentialing.

And, honestly, I was shocked when I dug into the space. It feels like the seemingly boring task of getting credentialed with insurance has turned into what honestly feels like a world of sharks. It seems like there are 3 trends at play:

This is truly a bureaucratic headache: You do need to buckle up for some super confusing portals to get credentialed.

Credentialing services are all too happy to take your money: They take your personal information because of...

In the United States, approximately 49,000 people die by suicide each year. And, unfortunately, the rate of suicide has increased substantially since 2000, up about 30%. 

Suicide remains among the 10 leading causes of death among persons aged 10-64 years and is the second leading cause of death among those aged 10-14 and 25-34.

While these trends are multifactorial, they are particularly distressing because evidence-based approaches to screening and intervention are better established than ever. 

Yet confidence and training in these approaches remain too low — even among behavioral health workers. OTs, PTs, and SLPs are uniquely positioned to r...

Fixing healthcare is simple: More people need preventative, conservative care earlier.

But getting to this fix is a massively complex web of structural policy choices. The reality is that our modern healthcare system often misaligns incentives, rewarding the management of chronic sickness over the investment in wellness. We've seen a shift toward market consolidation, where vertically integrated monopolies-both in insurance and hospital systems-drive up prices while limiting choice.

It's this playbook-which includes a lack of site-neutrality, high specialist payments, and insufficient transparency-that has allowed consolidated systems to post record revenues, even as:

SEO has long been the absolute best way to maintain a consistent therapy client caseload for outpatient therapists. But, for therapists in all settings really, understanding and optimizing your digital real estate is often a secret sauce for career growth.

In today's course, we want to help you:

This task has gone from important to urgent with the onslaught of...

For years, "Occupational Therapy in Primary Care" has felt like a professional aspiration-a "gold standard" we discussed in classrooms but rarely saw in job postings. Today, that reality is shifting. Following the 2020 statutory mandates in Norway and Sweden that solidified OT as a required primary care service, the global tide is turning.

In the United States, we are moving past the era of mere "co-location" toward true interprofessional integration. Driven by the rise of Alternative Payment Models (APMs) and the 2026 Medicare updates to Advanced Primary Care Management, the door is finally opening for OTs to lead in...

Thumb osteoarthritis is a common condition in older adults. By age 50, the prevalence is about 8% in men and 25% in women-and it increases with age, with meta-analysis data suggesting that by age 80, approximately 39% of women have radiographic signs of thumb base OA.

Conservative treatment is widely acknowledged as first-line care for thumb CMC OA, including occupational and physical therapy, particularly to help initiate splinting and exercise programs.

With conservative treatment roughly 4 out of 5 cases can be managed successfully without surgery.

Given the relatively high prevalence and importance of conservative intervention, it is critical that...

The landscape of healthcare has been changed forever with the introduction of AI.

Already, 1 in 3 adults are turning to chatbots to ask health related questions. For younger adults under age 30, the shift is even faster-nearly 30% now use AI specifically for mental health and emotional support.

Amid these broad changes is a specific question for us as therapists: 

What happens when the chatbot starts to play the role of therapist?

This service is already being offered by tools - like Abby - "Your AI Therapist."

This raises so many questions f...

The landscape of private practice changed forever this year. With Amazon officially adding physical therapy to its marketplace, accessing rehabilitation services is now as easy as ordering a pair of shoes. This shift signifies a massive rise in public awareness of therapy services-but it also brings a new set of challenges for the independent practitioner.

How do you compete with a global giant? How do you meet the "one-click" expectations of modern clients?

In our 2026 "Starting an OT Practice" course, we dive into the complexities of launching and sustaining a practice in this high-tech, high-convenience...

Travel therapy offers some of the highest compensation in rehab, yet it remains one of the most logistically challenging practice areas. Succeeding on the road requires a distinct mindset shift, balancing clinical flexibility with savvy career management.

Whether you are eyeing your first contract or looking to refine your travel strategy, this course walks you through the essential day-to-day considerations of a nomadic career. We will dive into three overarching questions:

Most parents start their OT journey with a frantic Google search: “Does my child need OT?” Unfortunately, the answers they find are often buried in vague recommendations about “missing milestones.”

In this one-hour course, former AOTA President and pediatric practice owner Alyson Stover, MOT, JD, OTR/L, BCP explores how we can move beyond ambiguity. We’ll dive into actionable strategies for improving clarity and access, ensuring that therapists can empower parents and providers to connect children with the right services at the most critical times.

See full course details here:
https://otpotentia...

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) remains the leading cause of non-traumatic disability in adults aged 18–65. Because of its prevalence and the vital role of therapy in management, it is a clinical area we return to often at OT Potential.

We previously explored this topic through the inspiring lens of Dr. Sarah Adam, OTD, OTR/L—a professor and Paralympic medalist living with MS. In this upcoming one-hour course, we continue the conversation by diving into the latest evidence-based research through the lens of an outpatient neurological specialist.

Joining us is Make...