WoW Woman in Health Tech I Rachel Mack Robinson, President and founder of DotCom Therapy
Rachel Mack Robinson is the President and founder of DotCom Therapy.
She is a third-generation entrepreneur with a master's degree in communication sciences & disorders from Missouri State University. Through her experiences as a speech-language pathologist working with children in schools and in a neurology clinic, she realized that many children do not have access to the therapy services they need. These experiences led her to seek a solution for children whose needs were not being met, and she ultimately did so by founding DotCom Therapy in 2015.
Today, DotCom Therapy is the most comprehensive pediatric teletherapy provider for healthcare and educational organizations across the nation, offering mental health, behavioral, speech, and occupational teletherapy services to more than 400 schools and healthcare systems across 41 states. DotCom Therapy employs more than 200 people, including more than 150 licensed therapists across 48 states, all of whom are ethically hired as W2 employees.
Tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far.
My name is Rachel Mack Robinson, and I am the President and Founder of the leading pediatric teletherapy provider, DotCom Therapy. I’m a third-generation entrepreneur, but my career didn’t start that way. I’m a speech-language pathologist by training, and after working with kids in schools and a neurology clinic for a few years, I quickly recognized how so many were going without the help they needed due to access issues in the industry. That’s when the entrepreneurialism in my family kicked in and I founded DotCom Therapy to build something that would greatly help people.
Today, DotCom Therapy is a rapidly growing pediatric teletherapy provider. We’ve assembled and employed a nationwide team of top therapists that delivers a speech, mental, and occupational therapy services and delivered more than 350k therapy sessions to schools, healthcare partners, and directly families across the country.
How did you get into this industry? Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?
As a speech pathologist, I witnessed firsthand the many barriers families and children faced accessing the therapy they needed. In some cases, it was people struggling to find the right help -- therapists with the right experience and qualifications to address a child or family’s specific needs. And in far too many other cases, I saw people struggling to find any help at all. We have a huge shortage of qualified therapists in this country, which has been a big contributing factor to the struggles families face. It’s an especially acute challenge for families in rural areas where the therapist pool is scarce, forcing people to drive hours each way for an appointment. It’s been challenging for many families in urban settings too, where high demand and cost can be huge barriers to care.
In 2015, I realized remote therapy could be the answer and that’s when the idea of DotCom Therapy was born, with the mission to make therapy available to children, everywhere through telehealth.
Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?
One of the biggest challenges to starting DCT in 2015 was that we were an early mover in telehealth, specifically in the pediatric therapy space. It was a time when there was little research available on the success of virtual therapy. In fact, my idea was to start providing therapy through partnerships with schools that had trouble staffing speech therapists, and it was difficult to even find a school willing to test out remote therapy. Weeks were spent calling on schools to discuss the idea, and stacking up countless no’s.
Finally, after some persistence, a very remote school district in Alaska was willing to give the idea a try -- with conditions. They were open to testing out a hybrid approach in which I would fly up to the Alaskan Bush once a month to treat students face-to-face and then the rest of the month could deliver services remotely back in Missouri where I was at the time.
Luckily, they took a chance. It was very successful, paving the way to work with other schools and eventually health providers across the country. We are thrilled that this pilot school site remains a partner of ours to this day.
How long did it take you to be where you are now? What was the biggest obstacle?
I founded DCT seven years ago and the journey has been extremely rewarding, but we still have a long way to go. I’ve talked a lot about the therapist shortage and while it’s still a big challenge for children and families seeking care, it’s also an obstacle for companies like ours. But it’s one we’re constantly working to address and being therapist founded has helped. One of the ways we’ve addressed it is by being the first -- and still the only -- pediatric therapy provider to fully hire all of our therapists as W-2 employees with benefits for full-time providers. At many other companies, the therapists are contract workers, but our decision to start with W-2 employees was a big turning point for the company. Giving our therapists full benefits and health coverage was more than the right thing to do. It has also had an extremely positive impact on our therapists and the company as a whole. It harnesses a company of positive work culture, support, and quality. We’ve been able to maintain a 97% retention rate among our therapists, whereas the industry average is below 60%. But the benefits for our patients are even more important -- the stability we can offer them to build a relationship and rapport with a therapist they trust is invaluable.
What are the challenges of being in the industry you are in?
There’s a lot of bureaucracy and red tape you have to deal with to get kids the help they need. We know kids need help, and we have therapists to help them, but unfortunately, there’s so much that needs to happen before we can start delivering care. For example, there are a lot of issues with credentialing and state licensure that we have to deal with. As a teletherapy company, we have the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere. But it’s not that easy. We can’t just connect people across the country, even if we have a therapist that would be a perfect match for a child’s clinical needs, personality, or other circumstances. We can’t work across state lines and have to make sure our therapists are credentialed in the state where they’re delivering care as well as the state they reside in. Licensing compacts have been proposed and are in process, but it is not comprehensive.
Another example of the red tape that many of us are all too familiar with is the process of paying for healthcare and dealing with insurance. Once again, it’s not as easy as pairing a child with the right therapist– they also need the right insurance. There’s a lot of complexity in figuring out who will pay for the care, but it’s something we do our best to help families navigate and many health plans are motivated to find these solutions.
What are your biggest achievements to date?
My biggest achievements come in the form of a lot of small ones. Whether it is hearing patient success stories or feedback from our therapists on their happiness in our company, those are the little things that keep me going. There have been recognitions and awards that are always exciting to receive but nothing adds up to seeing our mission in motion.
Also, I would be remiss to not recognize the stage the company is in today. That alone is a huge achievement. Many start-ups don’t succeed past their first couple of years, fewer female founders receive funding as compared to their male peers, and I have no business background. The fact that we are in year seven, continuing on an upward trajectory of significant growth year over year while making an impact, is a massive achievement. An achievement I want to help others like me reach.
What are the projects you are currently working on?
We’re very focused on growing and expanding to help more kids. Part of that involves work we’re doing on the proprietary technology platform that we use to deliver therapy and manage all the complexities and compliance issues I talked about earlier.
Another big project has been our acquisition of a company called Wolf+Friends and working to seamlessly integrate our two organizations. Wolf+Friends is a social networking community designed for caregivers with special needs children to connect with each other and with verified experts to whom they can turn for information, webinars, and advice. We’re very excited about the new Wolf+Friends mobile app that we just launched, which is available to download on iOS and Android devices.
Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why?
The #WomenInTech movement is very important to me along with other feminist initiatives. Representation is everything! I recently heard a story from one of our advisors who became an MD during a time when there weren’t many female doctors. Her son asked if “boys could be doctors too?” Her representation as a female doctor was so profound that he associated all doctors to be like his mother. I look at the #womenintech movement the same. The more people recognize that women can work in tech (or anywhere), the more women will hopefully enter this field previously dominated by males.
What will be the key trends in your industry in the next five years and where do you see them heading?
In the next 5 years, I see the role of teletherapy growing exponentially. When we started DCT, teletherapy was very rare, but we’ve made a lot of progress and it’s now become a very accepted method of care. A 2020 Child Mind Study found that 86% of parents participating in teletherapy saw positive results. Obviously, the pandemic had a lot to do with that, but since we had been delivering teletherapy long before the pandemic, we had a lot of experiences and lessons learned under our belt that allowed us to hit the ground running when people needed it.
We are also seeing a shift in behavior therapy. More families of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are leaving Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and seeking services like Occupational Therapy and Speech Therapy that can address the driving source of many behaviors such as communication difficulties, sensory disorders, and feeding aversions. As a speech therapist myself, this is a trend in the positive direction and I hope to continue to see more collaboration across therapy domains.
I’m also excited to see how the industry advances with more technological advancements and capabilities. For example, it will be interesting to see how the Metaverse plays a role in teletherapy! We are already seeing some exciting Virtual Reality trends here such as companies like Floreo entering the market.
What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?
Don’t give up, even after thousands of “no’s.” Don’t let anyone discourage you from something you are passionate about. In most cases, things don’t go right on the first try, so always be ready to learn from mistakes, adapt, and move on.
Also, one piece of advice that’s important, especially for teletherapy is to trust that everyone's heart is in the right place and that everyone you work with has good intentions. In a remote environment, when someone misses a deadline, doesn’t meet your expectations, or wrongly executes a task, it is easy to assume the worst. It is important to shift your mindset to be more empathic and to come from a place of understanding versus blaming. When you lead with the thought that a person had positive intentions, conversations are much more productive and you establish a supportive work environment.
Who are three inspirational women in your respective industry you admire?
Dr. Colleen Kraft [2018 AAP president]
Dr. Caroline Carney [President and CMO of Magellan BH]
Karen S. Lynch [President and CEO of CVS]
This interview was conducted by Marija Butkovic, Digital Marketing and PR strategist, founder, and CEO of Women of Wearables. She regularly writes and speaks on topics of wearable tech, fashion tech, IoT, entrepreneurship, and diversity. Follow Marija on Twitter @MarijaButkovic and read her stories for Forbes here.