The Modern Therapist's Survival Guide with Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy

Working Within a Broken Insurance System: Payer Scrutiny, Claim Denials, and Value-Based Care in Private Practice - An Interview with Sheetal Shah and Shehzad Moiz of SimplePractice

Sheetal Shah and Shehzad Moiz of SimplePractice on mental health insurance, claim denials, and value-based care.

Curt and Katie talk with Sheetal Shah, who leads payer, employer, and health system partnerships at SimplePractice, and Shehzad Moiz, VP of Product Management for revenue cycle management, about the state of mental health insurance for private practice therapists. They dig into why payers are scrutinizing claims and session length more closely, how insurers are using AI, and what value-based care could look like in mental health.

Katie also asks the question many clinicians are asking: whether working with insurance means propping up a broken system. Sheetal and Shehzad talk through credentialing on your own versus joining platforms like Alma and Headway, decoding claim denials, owning your directory profile, and how SimplePractice decides which payers it will and won't partner with.

This is a useful conversation for therapists who take insurance, are thinking about getting paneled, or are trying to figure out what payer mix makes sense for their practice.

This episode is part of our partnership with SimplePractice. As part of that agreement, we get to ask the hard questions, and our discussion and opinions are our own.

In this episode, we discuss:

- Why payer scrutiny of codes like 90837 is increasing, and what's driving it

- How documentation and outcome measures like the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 can protect your practice

- Where value-based care is likely to start in mental health

- How credentialing tools differ from platforms like Alma and Headway

- What to do when a claim denial code doesn't make sense

- Why owning your profile, license, and contracts protects your independence

- How to think about participating in an insurance system you don't fully trust

Timestamps:

- 05:43 - The current mental health insurance landscape

- 11:06 - Why payers are scrutinizing 90837 and session length

- 16:14 - How insurance companies are using AI

- 18:56 - Is partnering with insurance propping up a broken system?

- 24:25 - What value-based care could look like in mental health

- 27:01 - Credentialing without giving up your independence

- 30:15 - Decoding claim denials and disappearing claims

- 32:18 - Structural advocacy and owning your profile

- 34:10 - How SimplePractice chooses payer partners, and its no-gos

- 37:53 - Insurance Essentials, Insurance Navigator, and SimpleConnect

Guest Bios:

Sheetal Shah brings 20 years of experience in AI, digital health, and health IT, with leadership roles at Woebot, SymphonyRM, Microsoft/Accenture, and the NIH/NIAID. At SimplePractice, he leads payer, employer, and health system commercial partnerships that broaden mental health access.

Shehzad Moiz brings 15+ years of experience in product strategy, fintech, and health tech, with leadership roles at Navan and Expedia. As VP Product Management at SimplePractice, he leads product for revenue cycle management, including insurance and payments, helping behavioral health clinicians get paid faster and spend less time on billing.

Full show notes and transcript: https://mtsgpodcast.com

Join the Modern Therapist Community

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/mtsgpodcast

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/therapyreimagined

Modern Therapist's Survival Guide Creative Credits

Voice Over by DW McCann: https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/

Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano: https://groomsymusic.com/

Finding Possibility Within Harmful Systems: Hope, Solidarity, and Systemic Thinking in Therapy - An Interview with Travis Heath, PhD

Most of us were trained to look for the problem inside the client. Curt and Katie welcome Travis Heath, PhD, back for a long-awaited second conversation about widening that lens: seeing clients in the systems they inhabit, recognizing that therapists live inside those same systems, and continuing to show up for clients anyway.

Drawing on narrative therapy and Black abolitionist thought, Travis explores how to name harm you can't fix in a single session without leaving clients hopeless. Few of us can opt out of late capitalism, so he looks for the in-between space: small, particular ways clients (and therapists) can relate differently to harmful systems and find possibility where it looked like there was none. He also makes the case for solidarity alongside empathy, uncertainty as a gateway to hope, and slowing down in a profession that keeps asking us to be more productive.

This conversation is for therapists thinking about DEI, social justice, and stewardship of the profession, and for anyone trying to practice with integrity inside systems they didn't design.

In this episode, we discuss:

- Why many presenting problems are shaped by the systems clients live in, not only by what's inside them

- How asking where a client's values came from helps clarify what they actually want

- Finding micro-alternatives within late capitalism instead of all-or-nothing thinking

- Why certainty, whether optimistic or catastrophic, gets in the way of hope

- How Black abolitionist thought reframes change as presencing and small experiments

- Why solidarity asks for collective action in a way empathy alone does not

- Rethinking productive therapy and choosing which battles to fight

Timestamps:

- 02:05 - Who Travis is and what he's putting into the world

- 04:23 - Seeing problems in context, not only inside the client

- 09:54 - Questioning inherited stories and values

- 14:48 - Living in the in-between within late capitalism

- 19:53 - Uncertainty, hope, and Rebecca Solnit

- 25:20 - How Travis sustains himself in this work

- 30:01 - Black abolitionist thought and solidarity

- 38:32 - Individual and collective responsibility for therapists

- 46:36 - Productivity, diagnosis, and choosing your battles

- 51:32 - Questioning with purpose, not nihilism

Guest Bio:

Travis Heath, PhD, is a licensed psychologist and Associate Professor at San Diego State University, where he chairs the Department of Counseling & School Psychology. His work explores how culture, power, and dominant stories shape people's lives, including cultural democracy, Black abolitionist scholarship, and the use of rap music in narrative therapy. He is co-author, with David Epston and Tom Carlson, of Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography (Routledge, 2022), creator of the Psychotherapy.net video series Reimagining Multiculturalism: A Contemporary Narrative Approach, and host of the Therapist Confidential podcast.

Full show notes and transcript: mtsgpodcast.com

Join the Modern Therapist Community

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/mtsgpodcast

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/therapyreimagined

Modern Therapist's Survival Guide Creative Credits

Voice Over by DW McCann: https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/

Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano: https://groomsymusic.com/

Advocate From Where You Are: How Therapists Can Support Inclusion as DEI Gets Rolled Back

Therapist advocacy as DEI gets rolled back: Curt and Katie on supporting inclusion from where you are.

Federal mental health funding is being cut, and universities and agencies are pulling DEI language off their websites. If you have been waiting for your licensing board, your agency, or the government to protect representation and access in this profession, Curt Widhalm, LMFT, and Katie Vernoy, LMFT, think you could be waiting a very long time.

Curt and Katie open a new sprint built around two principles that have guided the podcast for nine years: representation and inclusion strengthen the field, and therapists are stewards of the profession. They skip the case for why representation matters and take on the harder questions. When does expanding access prop up a broken system? Why do call-outs of other therapists so often come from privilege? How do cultural modes of healing fit alongside evidence-based requirements? And what kind of advocacy actually changes anything?

They realize that everyone has their own particular situations, and they're honest that there is no single right answer. Your context, your capacity, and the way your practice is built all shape what's possible, and doing something small still counts.

In this episode, we discuss:

- Why waiting for institutions to protect inclusion leaves therapists stuck

- How access can reach beyond insurance through sliding scale, pro bono spots, and support for local agencies

- Why the same decision looks completely different depending on where and how you practice

- How privilege shapes both call-out culture and who has time for advocacy

- What separates advocacy that reaches policy makers from posting for likes

- How cultural context can be weighed alongside consumer protection in ethics work

- Why disability, neurodivergence, consumers of services, and prelicensed therapists get left out of DEI conversations

- Small, accessible ways to support inclusion in your own practice

Timestamps:

- 00:16 - Why institutions won't fix the profession for us

- 02:21 - The representation and inclusion principle

- 03:10 - Therapists as stewards of the profession

- 05:25 - Access versus propping up a broken system

- 07:57 - Liability, civil disobedience, and protecting yourself

- 09:53 - Why there is no one-size-fits-all choice

- 13:07 - Privilege, call-outs, and cultural modes of healing

- 16:08 - Advocacy that actually moves the needle

- 21:16 - Consumer protection versus gatekeeping

- 25:26 - Who gets left out of DEI conversations

- 28:50 - Small steps any therapist can take

Full show notes and transcript: mtsgpodcast.com

Join the Modern Therapist Community

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/mtsgpodcast

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/therapyreimagined

Modern Therapist's Survival Guide Creative Credits

Voice Over by DW McCann: https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/

Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano: https://groomsymusic.com/

Is Your Client Data Safe with AI? What Therapists Need to Know About HIPAA, BAAs, and Session Transcripts - An Interview with Ali Hartley, JD

Ali Hartley, JD, SimplePractice's Chief Legal Officer, on HIPAA, AI scribes, BAAs, and data privacy for therapists.

Most therapists are feeling uneasy about data privacy in the age of AI, and some are terrified that their session transcripts are being used to build their replacements. In this continuing education podcourse, Curt and Katie take both concerns to Ali Hartley, JD, Chief Legal Officer at SimplePractice.

Ali explains how the HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules apply to AI scribes and other AI tools, why a business associate agreement (BAA) is necessary but never sufficient, and how HIPAA's Safe Harbor and Expert Determination methods of de-identification work. She also clears up the difference between training an AI model and refining the prompts that guide a product, including what SimplePractice does with de-identified session transcripts. This episode is part of our partnership with SimplePractice.

Whether you use an AI note taker built into your EHR, a browser extension, or a separate tool you copy and paste into, this conversation will help you protect client data and ask better questions about the software in your practice.

In this episode, we discuss:

- Why HIPAA applies to AI tools the same way it applies to every other technology

- What a BAA covers, and what stays your responsibility as the covered entity

- The four points where client data is most vulnerable in an AI scribe workflow

- How Safe Harbor, Expert Determination, and data decoupling protect session transcripts

- Why refining prompts with de-identified data is different from training an AI model

- The data privacy risks of browser extensions and copy-and-paste workflows

- What to ask before adopting any AI tool that handles client data

Timestamps:

- 07:08 - HIPAA basics for therapists

- 10:34 - How HIPAA applies to AI and where client data is vulnerable

- 15:38 - What a BAA does and doesn't guarantee

- 24:16 - De-identification: Safe Harbor vs. Expert Determination

- 29:43 - Training an AI model vs. refining prompts

- 36:55 - How SimplePractice handles session transcripts

- 42:38 - Native EHR tools, browser extensions, and copy and paste

- 51:41 - A checklist for vetting AI tools

- 56:09 - Emerging risks and liability for AI-generated notes

Guest Bio:

Ali Hartley, JD, is Chief Legal Officer at SimplePractice and a general counsel and healthcare attorney with nearly two decades of experience in corporate law, regulatory compliance, and people leadership. She helps SimplePractice remove administrative burdens for clinicians while enabling responsible innovation and protecting sensitive healthcare data.

Earn 1 CE credit for this podcourse at the Modern Therapist Learning Community: https://learn.moderntherapistcommunity.com/

Full show notes and transcript: https://mtsgpodcast.com

Join the Modern Therapist Community

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/mtsgpodcast

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/therapyreimagined

Modern Therapist's Survival Guide Creative Credits

Voice Over by DW McCann: https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/

Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano: https://groomsymusic.com/

The Therapist as Expert Witness: Standard of Care, Objectivity, and Staying in Your Role - An Interview with Nicol Stolar-Peterson, PsyD, LCSW, BCD

Nicol Stolar-Peterson, PsyD, LCSW, BCD on expert witness work for therapists, standard of care, and court roles.

Curt and Katie talk with Nicol, a national expert witness in child abuse, child protective services, and clinical social work, about what it takes for therapists to do this kind of work. The conversation grew out of Curt's first experience as a defense expert in a licensing board complaint, when he turned to Nicol to help him prepare.

Nicol explains how fact witness and expert roles differ, why treating therapists should be cautious when invited to testify as experts, and why standard of care means what a reasonable therapist would do rather than best practice. She also describes staying objective with attorneys trained to persuade, and what records review, reports, and depositions look like in real cases.

A useful listen for therapists curious about expert witness work, clinicians who may be called to testify, and anyone who wants to understand how standard of care gets evaluated in licensing board and civil cases.

In this episode, we discuss:

- What makes a therapist a strong expert witness, including the ability to explain expertise in plain language

- Where therapists find expert work, from child custody evaluations to records review

- How fact witness and expert roles differ, and why treating therapists should stay in their lane

- Why standard of care means reasonable, basic practice rather than best practice

- How experts stay objective when attorneys push for a particular opinion

- What records review, reports, and depositions look like in a typical case

Timestamps:

05:30 - What makes a good expert witness

09:11 - Where therapists find expert work

13:49 - Fact witness, expert witness, and testifying expert roles

22:06 - Standard of care: bronze versus gold

24:30 - Staying objective with attorneys

33:39 - Scheduling and what a typical case involves

37:23 - Depositions, settlements, and trials

Guest Bio:

Nicol Stolar-Peterson, PsyD, LCSW, BCD is a national expert witness in child abuse, child protective services, and clinical social work. She co-founded and runs Kids Court & Counseling Center, a nonprofit that helps children who are victims of crimes and abuse prepare for court testimony. She also provides therapy, trains new social workers, and offers mandated reporting trainings. Learn more at www.nicolstolar.com.

Full show notes and transcript: https://mtsgpodcast.com

Join the Modern Therapist Community

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/mtsgpodcast

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/therapyreimagined

Modern Therapist's Survival Guide Creative Credits

Voice Over by DW McCann: https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/

Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano: https://groomsymusic.com/