Giving incoming mental health clinicians and incoming clients alike access to online video content that walks them through easy-to-overlook, need-to-know information about the experience of therapy can yield better sessions, healthier clients, and more fulfilled clinicians—both in the short-term and far into the future.
It’s called virtual onboarding, and if you have already heard about the drastic improvements in quality and consistency of care that virtual client onboarding and virtual clinician onboarding can bring to your mental health practice, you may already be on your way to implementing it. Clinics large and small, public and private, are finding that video onboarding resources are a powerful tool for ironing out many of the familiar wrinkles that arise in therapy—ones that can make a therapy session inefficient for the clinician, ineffective for the client and downright uncomfortable for both.
Like any solution that keeps your office running smoothly, from your calendar app to your cloud-based collaboration tools, virtual onboarding resources for mental health clinicians require a financial investment. Any clinic is going to want to get the most out of this investment, and doing that requires implementing the right solution and making it an active part of how you do business.
Using virtual onboarding leads to clients who are better prepared to put in the work it takes to live better, to clinicians who can focus their full professional acumen on each client, and to more productive outcomes for all parties involved. The following tips will help you choose the right onboarding solution and implement it in a way that delivers that full value.
There is a growing number of vendors out there offering onboarding tools for incoming employees, with a specific focus on promoting employee wellness, well-being, collaboration and workplace effectiveness. Such tools can certainly be valuable if used correctly, but when you are looking for a virtual clinician onboarding tool for a mental health environment, it’s critical that you go with a vendor made by and for mental health experts. Mental health clinicians face distinct regulatory, operational, and professional issues not present in other areas of either business or medicine, and it’s just those elements that new clinicians need to be most aware of when they start providing patient care.
On the client side, while client onboarding in other spaces might not yet be so prevalent, undoubtedly other verticals will find value in giving their incoming clients and customers video walkthroughs to get them prepared. As these other, more general solutions begin to proliferate, make sure that whatever client onboarding solutions you run across, that you implement one where the video resources speak to the unique characteristics of what therapy entails. A therapist-client relationship is unique from any other professional-client interaction. Clients need to understand how and why that is the case. Having this information distilled by experts in the field, and conveyed in easy-to-understand videos is the way to get them there.
Any useful online solution can become a wasted expense if it isn’t used, or is used incorrectly. This includes therapy onboarding videos. If a clinic partners with the right vendor, but does not have a thoughtfully organized onboarding process in place, the videos will sit there on the cloud unwatched. This is a bad investment for a mental health clinician, and deprives both clients and clinicians of the value that virtual onboarding offers.
Every clinician in your practice should know what the onboarding materials are, how they are expected to use them, and where they can access them. Every client should receive the correct links and materials that drive home that virtual onboarding is a part of the process of getting therapy—not something to glance over and forget about. Good onboarding materials are made for you to weave into your clinic’s regular routine.
Virtual onboarding tools are “alive” in the sense that the video content for both clients and clinicians can’t sit there and remain the same from day one. Regulatory burdens, best practices for treatment, and even legal demands on clients and clinicians are always evolving and changing. The right vendor hosting and creating onboarding content will be aware of any major global shifts in the therapy discipline and will update things accordingly. As a mental health clinician, you should maintain an open dialogue with them about new needs you’re seeing, locally and on a bigger scale, to inform the ongoing development of timely, relevant content.
Clinicians will first use virtual onboarding videos when they start the job. Clients will use them shortly before their first appointment. In neither case should this be the last time they view them. The link to virtual onboarding resources stays good and the information is always available, on demand. To make the best use of your virtual onboarding materials, be certain that clinicians and clients know this—you can even suggest a review of particular videos where appropriate.
Following the above tips as you implement and utilize onboarding videos, both for clients and clinicians, will help ensure that you see the types of improvements that virtual onboarding promises.
Clients arrive at the therapist wanting to address the issues that stand in the way of their living confidently and contently. Clinicians stake their careers on being able to help clients build themselves up, attaining and maintaining this goal. Both clinicians and clients do better if they know where to start. Making the right virtual onboarding tools a foundational part of a mental health practice shows them where. With virtual onboarding, everyone is on the same page about any number of little things that tend to derail therapy when overlooked, misunderstood, or improperly addressed. This way, both clinicians and clients can anticipate a future of ever-improving outcomes.