Michelle Coil graduated with her Masters of Occupational Therapy in 2004 and became a Certified Hand Therapist in 2012. She has spent 17 years in clinical practice in the treatment of hand and upper extremity rehabilitation. She holds additional certifications as an Ergonomic Assessment Specialist and Professional Yoga Therapist. In 2018, Michelle founded Virtual Hand Care, a telehealth practice devoted to creating accessible solutions for people with upper extremity injuries. She is a member of ASHT and has presented on telehealth at ASHT’s 2019 and 2020 national conferences. In addition, Michelle is a course creator, contributing author, consultant to clinicians, and founder of the resourceful Hand Nerds Facebook group.
2020 brought many challenges to not only our personal lives, but also our professional lives. Many of us had to rethink the way that we provided hand therapy services to our patients and jumped right into telehealth. Our guest today though is no stranger to telehealth. In 2018, she was looking for a new way to provide access to hand therapy and began seeing patients virtually. Now, one year into a pandemic, more patients are seeking telehealth services and finding value in this approach to therapy. In this episode, we will be discussing how hand and upper extremity therapy can be delivered through telehealth and how we as clinicians can show our consumers, payors and referring providers the value of telehealth.
