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McKenzie Robinson | SBJ

2021 Health Care Champions Therapist: Allyson Beary

TheraCare Outpatient Services LLC

Posted online

Allyson Beary has had to adapt in ways in the last year and a half that she never imagined.

After graduating from Missouri State University with her master’s degree in May 2017, Beary began working at TheraCare Outpatient Services LLC as a speech-language pathologist evaluating augmentative and alternative communication.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and in-person visits were put on pause, Beary researched what was needed to conduct AAC evaluations via telehealth visits. “I got to work contacting my local Missouri Medicaid rep via email, phone call and written letter in an attempt to persuade them to allow me to complete evaluations virtually,” Beary says. “In April 2020, we were granted permission and I resumed evaluating, completing 20-plus virtual evaluations over the rest of the year.”

The main reason Beary says she pushed so hard for telehealth AAC evaluations is that she’s the only speech-language pathologist in southwest Missouri approved by Medicaid and Medicare to evaluate patients and recommend AAC devices. Without performing evaluations over telehealth, many patients would have had to wait until the pandemic precautions ended.

Beary provides this care as a speech-language pathologist by working to prevent, assess, diagnose and treat disorders that can cause difficulties in communication. These can include disorders in speech, language and swallowing and can result from traumatic brain injuries, strokes or dementia.

According to Beary, impaired speech or the complete absence of speech is a characteristic of many different diagnoses both children and adults can receive. Such cases may require more than traditional therapy, and she works to combine today’s technology with proven practices to allow her patients to take control of their environment. She can help patients who have difficulty with verbal communication learn how to communicate via sign language, texting and emailing, among other ways.

“Transforming a family’s perception of their loved ones has the ability to reconnect relationships and that has become my motivation,” Beary says

Beary’s work is more than just caring for patients. She counsels families to build confidence in interacting with their loved ones. She assists in reconnecting families to join the nonverbal and verbal worlds.

“I repeatedly hear family members express feelings of guilt, confusion and overall apprehension in regard to their ability to connect with the atypical communicator,” Beary says. “By giving individuals access to an alternative voice while simultaneously building confidence, I get to witness a beautiful shift in the family dynamic.”

Beary’s proudest accomplishment is the reputation she has built in her community. Being the only local speech-language pathologist locally to certified to specialize in assistive technology has given her a great depth of knowledge and experience. She used that knowledge to present a lecture at a brain injury seminar in 2018.

Outside of her work at TheraCare, Beary has spent the past seven summers working at Camp Encourage with children on the autism spectrum.

Beary says Missouri lags behind other states in Medicaid reimbursement, so she often finds herself educating the community on fair reimbursement rates for those who qualify for state assistance.

“The staff at TheraCare, myself included, have made it a mission to educate the community on these situations in hopes of seeing improvement in the current system,” Beary says. 

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