Many of our readers reacted with surprise to Monday’s post (“Facebook connects your clients, even if you don’t use Facebook”). It certainly reinforces the idea that if you are not actively and regularly working to protect the confidentiality of your clients on social media, you may not be doing enough.
Law and ethics
Facebook connects your clients, even if you don’t use Facebook
In testimony to Congress the week before last, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a point of emphasizing that if you’re a Facebook user, you own your information. This is meant to reassure users, but it is more than a little misleading. “Your information” is what you personally have uploaded to Facebook. You do not own what other people have uploaded about you. That’s what has privacy advocates so concerned. It’s also why even therapists who don’t use Facebook should be worried about the client confidentiality risks that the company poses.
Three easy ways to collect outcome data
Therapists and counselors are increasingly required to formally gather outcome data on their work. This is good: The more data that we have on our work, the more intentional and effective our clinical decisions can become. Regularly collecting and attending to outcome data, therefore, suggests constant movement towards improvement.
Many therapists struggle, however, with questions about what data to gather, and how to best gather it. Even among those who philosophically agree that regularly collecting outcome data helps to more meaningfully direct therapy, they often don’t do it.
Thankfully, there are a number of easy ways for therapists to collect outcome data. Many come at no cost. The following are just three of the many different tools/assessments therapists can use to collect and interpret outcome data.
Fee splitting in private practice may be illegal and unethical
We’ve talked here many a time about employment of prelicensed therapists. Most of our discussion has focused on employer abuses and how you can push back. But of course it’s worth noting that plenty of employers are fantastic, and that even a lot of the illegality in employment arrangements can be chalked up to well-meaning mistakes rather than purposeful villainy. It is in that spirit that we approach what seems to be one of the most common structures for paying prelicensed therapists who work in private practices here in California: Fee splitting.
Getting (and giving) better answers to legal questions on Facebook
Facebook is a great resource for gathering information. Often, and for the right reasons, we turn to social media in hopes of gathering information we need in a short period of time and with little effort. But for therapists going to social media with legal questions, that convenience may not be worth it. Many of the answers therapists give peers for legal questions on Facebook are incorrect.
We reviewed 20 recent posts that included legal questions in therapist groups on Facebook. We looked strictly at legal questions where there was a clear correct answer that we could easily reference. So anything requiring interpretation of law was purposefully left out. Our review was by no means comprehensive — it falls more closely in bar-napkin-math territory. But we still think this quick review offers some valuable information.