February 2023 Newsletter

DiagnosTEX Open House

Come see our new outpatient MBSS clinic. February 9 from 5pm – 7pm at our office located at 8913 Mid Cities Blvd., Suite 100, North Richland Hills 76182. Hors d’oeuvres and a variety of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages will be served. We will have a raffle for those that attend. Please bring a business card to add to our referral board. We look forward to meeting you!

DiagnosTEX Website

www.dysphagiadiagnostex.com has been updated with all new 2023 paperwork for adults and peds. Please go there to download anything you need. While you are there visit the Barium Barista Café and look through our SHOP for some new products.

NEW DTEX SLP

DiagnosTEX is looking for a new FT SLP to join our team. DiagnosTEX usually does not advertise for this position because we used to interact so much more with local SLP’s on a regular basis, but since COVID, there are so few that we have contact with lately. The position will include 3 months of training and the skills acquired with this will be a professional lifetime of benefit. If you think you may be interested, please send your resume to us at Ronda@diagnostex.us or Pam@diagostex.us.

TSHA

TSHA 66th Annual Convention & Exhibition is close! TSHA is scheduled to be in February 23-25, 2023, in Austin, Texas. Ampcare will have a booth! Look forward to reconnecting with everyone. I will be presenting with Lisa Milliken, MA, SLP-CCC, FNAP, CDP, RAC- CT on a course titled Dysphagia in the Cardiopulmonary Patient – Establishing the Best Practice on Friday February 24, 2023 from 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM. Hope you can join in on the session!

TSHA Business Management Committee 2023

Pam Ragland and I are the new 2023 committee chairs for the TSHA Business Management Committee. We feel we have expanded the committee in 2023 with strong leaders and talented members to provide their expertise to support our purpose to provide guidance and ongoing support to other clinicians in a wide variety of practice settings which include private practice, SNF, Rehab, HH, and telepractice. Historically this committee has focused on professional issues and educated on developing a private practice, effective documentation, proper billing practices, in addition to the overall ethical and professional standards of practice. Our goal this year is to set up social media site to address professional and billing questions in these settings and hope to have a HH open to the public at TSHA in 2023. Please let us know if you have any questions, we will connect you with the right people of this committee to answer any questions you may have regarding any of the topics above.

More Dysphagia CE

The Dysphagia Research Society will host the 3rd WDS (World Dysphagia Summit) on March 13th - 14th, 2023, during the week of the 2023 DRS Annual Meeting.

Anyone having flashbacks? We are!

It is winter and now we have COVID, Flu, RSV, and Strep and the good ole common cold. DiagnosTEX is still implementing all COVID policies and protocols and following CDC guidelines as they continue to change. Patients are still our highest priority but so is safety for all involved! Healthcare staff is allowed to observe the MBSS standing at the front of the van with face mask. During these winter months, we are still allowing no family members to observe unless it is required for the patient to participate.

So many facilities policies and procedure differ across the metroplex. Some facilities have lightened their restrictions, while others have not. DiagnosTEX staff will not come into the buildings past the front desk, and we will not be entering any buildings that require us to sign in and do COVID screenings. We do this daily at DiagnosTEX before the staff leaves the our main office. If we had to do this at every facility, this would consume so much of our time during the day. If the facility requires this, you will be required to bring the patient to the van and we will not leave a report unless you can come back out to retrieve it from us, or we can email it at a later time. Please let us know if you have any questions. Also please understand, that we provide the staff or facility with 3 notifications of our arrival time. The day before during scheduling, a phone call as we leave the stop prior to you and then 5 minutes before we arrive. We feel we do due diligence to help prepare you for as accurate timing as possible. We are mobile and our ETA can vary depending on traffic, weather, difficult patients and waiting times when we arrive at facilities. We limit our waiting time to 15 minutes, if the patient is brought out to us in 15 minutes, we will reschedule and a cancellation fee will be applied. If we wait 15 minutes for patients at just 4 facilities that can cause us to run an 1 hour behind in the day. Without full cooperation with facilities, this can effect everyone’s schedule ours and anyone scheduled later that day.

Unpredictable Weather in Texas

It’s been a warm winter… so far!

Unfortunately, in Texas we typically do not get a beautiful flaky snowfall, we get ice (usually black ice which caused a horrible tragedy in FW and then the infamous SNOVID test our survival skills winter week) Our weather can change overnight and last 1 day or last multiple days! This kind of weather obviously becomes a problem for anyone who travels. Most of our daily routine is traveling extensively in all directions! As winter approaches and the threat of severe weather conditions arise, DiagnosTEX owners and drivers will evaluate the conditions of the roads and DiagnosTEX will contact all scheduled facilities immediately if we are unable to meet our appointments for that day. If the weather conditions are unsafe for driving, we will cancel the day and reschedule the studies as promptly as possible. Even though roads may be passable in one area, does not mean passing through another area to get there is possible and we have to take all routes and directions into consideration. We have precious cargo on board on mobile clinics, most importantly our staff!

New Pediatric Newsletter

We are including the premiere of the Pediatric newsletter at DiagnosTEX.. Call or email us if you would like to be added this newsletter mailing list.

Dysphagia Tidbit

Cervical Vertebral Height Approximates Hyoid Displacement in MBSS

Clinicians and researchers commonly judge the completeness of hyoid displacement from videofluoroscopic swallow study. Judgments made during the clinical exam are often subjective, and post-examination analysis reduces the measure’s immediate value. There was a study aimed to determine the validity and feasibility of a visual, anatomically scaled benchmark for judging complete hyoid displacement during a VFSS. The third and fourth cervical vertebral bodies (C3 and C4) lie at roughly the same vertical position as the hyoid body and are strongly correlated with patient height. They hypothesized that anterior and superior displacement of the hyoid bone would approximate the height of one C3 or C4 body during safe swallows. Trained raters marked points of interest on C3, C4, and the hyoid body on 1414 swallows of adult patients with suspected dysphagia (n = 195) and 50 swallows of age-matched healthy participants (n = 17), and rated Penetration Aspiration Scale scores. Results indicated that the mean displacements of the hyoid bone were greater than one C3 unit in the superior direction for all swallows from patient and healthy participants, though significantly and clinically greater in healthy participant swallows (p < .001, d > .8). The mean anterior and superior displacements from patient and healthy participant swallows were greater than one C4 unit. Results show preliminary evidence that use of the C3 and/or C4 anatomic scalars can add interpretive value to the immediate judgment of hyoid displacement during the conduct of a clinical VFSS/MBSS examination. Cervical Vertebral Height Approximates Hyoid Displacement in Videofluoroscopic Images of Healthy Adults

Amanda S. Mahoney, Yassin Khalifa, Erin Lucatorto, Ervin Sejdić & James L. Coyle Dysphagia volume 37, pages1689–1696 (2022)