Page 22 - 2024 August Report

WEINGARTEN CHILDREN’S CENTER REPORT (5)
FY2024 Overview Report for Johnson Scholarship Foundation
August 2024
Thank you very much for your support of Foundation for Hearing Research’s BabyTalk Teleintervention Program and Talk2MeTM Coach-assisted Parent Learning app. We are grateful for your support and excited to be embarking, with your support, on the next three years.
BabyTalk Update:
BabyTalk currently serves 89 families via listening and spoken language-focused teletherapy as well as counseling/consultative services. BabyTalk families reside throughout the state of California, typically in communities without access to qualified listening and spoken language professionals. The majority (74%) of families we serve meet the enrollment criteria for MediCal/California Children’s Services (CCS), principally family annual income of $40,000 or less. Many of the families we serve experience challenges such as language barriers, underemployment, lack of education, lack of transportation, or unstable housing that impede managing and coordinating the medical and educational services their children require.
BabyTalk utilizes ten tele-practitioners, including on-site therapists. Three of our therapists are teachers of the deaf, and seven are speech and language pathologists. Three of our therapists are bilingual native Spanish speakers enabling our program to work closely with monolingual Spanish speaking families.
We continue to expand insurance reimbursements, which cover less than 100% of our costs, but allow us to serve more families with available grant funding. We employ a part-time insurance specialist. We are pursuing agreements with county and multi-county MediCal/CCS insurer groups to facilitate claim processing.
For the past three years we have participated in the research study led by Dylan Chan, MD, a pediatric Ear Nose and Throat specialist from University of California San Francisco, “Teletherapy to Address Language Disparities in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children,” funded through the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Weingarten Children’s Center, along with UCSF, Children’s Hospital Oakland, Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego, and Seattle Children’s Hospital, WA, provides teletherapy and case-management services to vulnerable families randomized to the teletherapy arm of the study. The study is examining the efficacy of teletherapy within a vulnerable population of families with children with hearing loss. Its hypotheses include that the addition of teletherapy services to regular county Early Start services reduces health disparities and improve language outcomes within this population. Our hope is that favorable outcomes from the study will encourage expansion of teletherapy and standardize insurance reimbursement.
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