How to Plan a Great OT Session

There is a foundational skillset essential to occupational therapy that often isn’t covered in school: The ability to design a 60-minute session that is both clinically transformative and operationally sound.

Bridging the gap between high-level evidence—like task-specific practice for stroke recovery—and the realities of billing codes and patient engagement is no small feat. It is this specific ability to structure “best practice” into a seamless, hour-long experience that separates the master clinician from the novice.

In this 1 hour course, we sit down with Rachel Egan, OTR/L, CHT, COMT, a master clinician and rehab manager who understands this complexity firsthand. As an operational leader at NovaCare overseeing 13 clinics, Rachel balances the dual demands of high-quality patient care and administrative excellence.

You’ll leave this course ready to plan great OT sessions of your own.

1. You will be able to identify strategies for structuring client-centered and occupation-based OT treatment sessions, in which clients can experience a full range of the value OTs have to offer.

2. You will be able to identify how research about how incorporating multiple types of occupation based intervention into one session can improve outcomes can help you structure your service delivery for more impact.

• Intro

• Discussion

  1. What key milestones in your career helped you transition from a novice to a master clinician? How do you define the primary difference between a novice session and a master-level session?

  2. Let’s start by understanding billing codes and how they impact our sessions.

  3. What stands out in the research about a diversity of coding?

  4. What does the ideal “arc” of a 60-minute therapy session look like in your mind?

     • Touch on the uncomfortable: “I don’t want to treat people differently based on their insurance.”

  5. Can you walk us through the three basic templates you use to structure your sessions?

     • General Daily Session

       • Common variations (high pain, if patient has to shorten the session)

     • Eval

     • Re-eval discharge day

  6. Are there things you say/do in almost every session to make yourself and the client comfortable?

  7. The planning process is so arduous—how do you see technology and AI helping us bridge the gap between complex research and the practical reality of our daily schedules?

• Live Q&A

• Closing

• Goal planning in mental health service delivery: A systematic integrative review 

• Predicting first session working alliances using deep learning algorithms: A proof-of-concept study for personalized psychotherapy

• Influence of the Therapeutic Alliance on the Rehabilitation of Stroke: A Systematic Review of Qualitative Studies

• Skills and methods that work in psychotherapy: Observations and conclusions from the special issue

• The Influence of Active, Passive, and Manual Therapy Interventions on Escalation of Health Care Events After Physical Therapist Care in Veterans With Low Back Pain

• The Influence of Active, Passive, and Manual Therapy Interventions for Low Back Pain on Opioid Prescription and Health Care Utilization

• Effectiveness of Occupational Therapy Interventions for Musculoskeletal Shoulder Conditions: A Systematic Review

• A Comparison of Treatment Signatures of High and Low Performing Physical Therapists for Patients With Lower Back Pain: Analysis of Spine Care From a Physical Therapy Outcomes Registry

• Intensity of Physical Therapy Services: Association With Work and Health Outcomes in Injured Workers With Back Pain in Washington State

• Associations Between Treatment Processes, Patient Characteristics, and Outcomes in Outpatient Physical Therapy Practice

• Guiding Principles for the Practice of Integrative Physical Therapy

• Role of Occupational Therapy in Primary Care

• Is Rehabilitation’s Unifying Expertise Its Holistic Scope and Cognitive Approach to the Patient’s Problems? An Exploration

• What Influences Patient-Therapist Interactions in Musculoskeletal Physical Therapy? Qualitative Systematic Review and Meta-Synthesis

• To What Extent Does Therapy of Chronic Stroke Patients Address Participation? A Content Analysis of Ambulatory Physical and Occupational Therapy Based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health Framework

It is the policy of OT Potential to disclose any financial and non-financial interest the provider or instructor may have in a product or service mentioned during an activity. This is to ensure that the audience is made aware of any bias of the speaker.

OT Potential pays guest speakers an honorarium for their participation, either directly or to an institution of the speaker's choosing at their request. We invite guests whose expertise often comes from practices, programs, or building products in their field. Where a speaker has a financial interest in the subject of a course, we disclose it below so you can weigh it for yourself.

OT Potential's interest in this topic: We have no financial stake in this topic.

Speaker interests: Rachel Egan is an operational leader at NovaCare Rehabilitation, where she is responsible for 13 outpatient clinics. NovaCare is a for-profit rehabilitation provider whose revenue is affected by the billing and coding practices discussed in this course. She speaks in her personal capacity as a clinician; her views are her own and do not represent those of her employer.