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5 min read on how employees can seamlessly transition from therapy on Spill to therapy on their private medical insurance.

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Why we built this

Lots of the customers who offer Spill to their teams also offer them private medical insurance. This makes sense — there are things that private medical insurance does (like physio) that you can’t get on Spill; there are also things that Spill does (next-day therapy availability) that you can’t get on private medical insurance.

However, if you find a counsellor that you really like working with on Spill and then use up your company-allocated Spill sessions, the only option right now is to request more Spill sessions from your company or pay privately. This doesn’t make much sense when there are sessions sitting unused that your health insurance would cover.

For this reason, we have been working on building a bridge between Spill and the top 4 private medical insurances so that employees who want more therapy beyond their Spill cap can transition easily to their private medical insurance.

How the employee requests sessions

1. First the Spill administrator at the employee’s company has to turn on the feature in their settings:

   

2. When the employee runs out of Spill sessions and would like to continue with their counsellor, they will then see the option to continue via private medical insurance:

   

3. The employee can then make a request to continue, by providing their membership or account number from their policy. If they make a request, their Sessions page in the counsellor app will have a new section that looks like this:

   

4. At this point, Spill will check if their current counsellor is already registered with the relevant health insurer. In the case that they aren’t, we ask the counsellor if they would like to register (~1-2 weeks); if not, we match the employee to a pre-registered counsellor.

5. At this point, the employee can request their specific counsellor on their private medical insurance (all 4 allow you to request a specific counsellor) and once that’s been approved, the counsellor will be notified directly. At this point, the counsellor emails Spill so that we can update their health insurance data with the number of approved sessions:

   

Getting paid for the sessions

Once the sessions have been approved, they can be booked as usual in the Spill app. There is a new session type called Spill Facilitated PMI Session:

You can book these sessions in with the client which means they can see how many of their allowance they have used.

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Importantly, Spill does not pay you for these sessions. You will need to invoice the PMI provider directly at your own session rate. We will remind you to do this.

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