Keynote Speaker: Dr. Russ Newman, Executive Director, APA Practice Directorate.  We were very excited and honored to host Russ Newman Ph.D., The Executive Director for Professional Practice with The American Psychological Association as our keynote speaker at special forum at this past TPA Annual Convention. In January of 2008, Dr. Newman moved on to a new and exciting career in the academic world. Dr. Newman’s November journey to Tennessee was one of his last trips representing APA.

The major focus of every TPA Convention is professional quality presentations. This year we started the convention with two pre-convention workshops on Wednesday, October 31. The first featured a two-day presentation on Critical Incident Stress Management. This was the third of four consecutive years of this series. This year’s program was the Advanced Group Intervention Course on CISM. Rhiannon B Thomas, Ph.D. presented again this year. She is the Director of the International Center for Resilience in Occupational Stress & Trauma (ICROST) in Miami, Florida. The second pre-convention workshop this past year was a one-day program by Michael D. Chafetz, Ph.D., ABBP-ABCN and Andrew Phay, Ph.D., ABPN along with several other experts in the field on Malingering Assessment in Adults and in Children. Dr. Chafetz practices in New Orleans and in Dallas. These programs were for those who signed up for the full convention and were offered at an extra fee. They were both well attended and well received. TPA plans to offer such programs again next year. Dr. Thomas has agreed to return in 2008 to present a two-day program on the Critical Stress Management of Suicide.

There were more than 25 programs on the schedule this past year. The quality of our programs coupled nationally respected presenters and locally qualified scientists, researchers, and practitioners. Past post-convention surveys have always been very positive concerning the quality of presentations at TPA Conventions and such was true of our post convention evaluations this year. A major thrust of the convention this year was the student poster sessions. Dr. Anita Davis and Dr. Chris Dula coordinated the undergraduate and graduate poster sessions respectfully. They were both highly successful efforts with about twenty students presenting in each division.

The convention has been a major focus of the TPA Board over the years. We have already started working on the TPA Convention for 2008, November 5-8, 2008. Please send me an e-mail or call if you have suggestions about how we can improve the TPA Convention in 2008. See you in Nashville in November.

John B. Averitt, Ph.D., TPA Convention and Meetings Directorate

Make Your Life Easier: Make Managed Care Companies Approve at least 12 Sessions at a Time

This past legislative session, TPA was successful in passing a utilization review bill that no other state yet has passed. The bill "trumps" ERISA, so that insurance companies cannot claim that they are exempt from the bill because of their ERISA status. The bill says that, if an insurance company engages in utilization review on one of your patients, then it has one of two choices: it can take the position that no further treatment is medically necessary (in which case you appeal the decision), or they can approve more sessions. IF they approve ANY more sessions, then they must approve A MINIMUM OF 12 SESSIONS prior to the next utilization review. The bill went into effect July 1, 2007.

Our initial experience, as we suspect is yours, is that managed care companies (many of them out of state) are either ignorant of the bill or are ignoring it. To that end, we would like to provide you a tool with which to make your life easier: a letter to attach to all your utilization review requests in the short term, informing the managed care company of their obligations under Tennessee law. We hope that if we all use this, it will markedly improve their "compliance" with our new law.

To download a copy of the letter from the TPA Legislative Directorate to send with your utilization review forms, just click here (pdf format).

If you would like a copy of the new legislation itself, listing the revisions to the original utilization review law, just click here (pdf format).

If you would like to review the original legislation regarding minimum standards for "Utilization Review Agents" (TCA 56-6-705), click here for a link to Tennessee Code Annotated (regrettably, this only works reliably with Internet Explorer)

If you have any questions regarding this new law, please feel free to contact us at legislative.advocacy@tpaonline.org.