We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lori Allen a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lori, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

The largest risk I have taken in my career is leaving my position at Wolfson Children’s Hospital to open a private practice. I was the clinical lead for speech-language pathology for outpatient pediatrics, an Epic credential trainer with Baptist, and a well-established clinician with Wolfson Children’s outpatient rehabilitation for almost ten years. I had created a solid position with steady clientele and was highly valued. I was also financially secure with retirement and insurance coverage. I reached a point where I felt I had achieved what I could in that position, and I approached a crossroads. I started the application process to begin my clinical doctorate with the goal of teaching at the college level, but as I was completing the initial requirements I was sad to leave patient care. My favorite part of my job is hands-on patient care. I made the radical, scary, and maybe even a little crazy decision, to quit my secure and well-paid job to a private practice.

I had three months savings to get me as far as it could go, the support of my family, and faith in what I believed was a way for me to serve my community in a greater capacity. I decided to buy a historic riverside home and create a “cottage clinic”. I did not want to be another medical center with a waiting room and a staff full of medical professionals in scrubs. I wanted warm and welcoming home where kids think they are coming over to play, because they are. I wanted patients and staff to reach a comfort level that could not be achieved in a sterile medical setting. Kids could learn to play on the floor while the cat sleeps on the couch, ride a bike on the neighborhood sidewalk, and learn to wave to the mail carrier. I had spent almost a decade trapped in the walls of a hospital and I wanted to go outside to play, I suspected kids would like that as well.

We hit the ground running. I quit my position at the hospital and saw my first patient the next Monday in my new clinic. An occupational therapist joined me and together we completed 69 visits our first month. As of today we have been open 7 months, have 5 therapists working, and have completed 1700 visits. The idea to give patients a comfortable setting to be themselves, hang-out, and an active part of the treatment experience has proven to be wildly successful. People invest their energy into what they believe is valuable, and it is imperative in any healing environment that the family is invested.

We have families finds us through may different paths, many are word of mouth, and we also take pediatrician referrals. We have occupational, physical, speech, and feeding therapy so that we can offer the family a holistic treatment model to meet their needs in one place. We also take all Medicaid and Tricare plans and are in network with commercial providers except Aetna (they say people can go to the hospital for services). This allows us to use the family’s insurance benefits to cover services instead of requiring private pay.

We are just getting started and I believe we are on the path to something truly great for our community. Our success is measured in knowing that families who once felt intimidated and overwhelmed by rehabilitation services can now find hope and success in a happy place. For that result, it was a risk well worth taking.

Lori, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida and attended Florida State University for my degree program. After my sophomore year in college I made an appointment with a counselor at FSU for help in deciding a career. She looked over my transcript and asked me a few questions then handed me the list of coursework for speech-language pathology, which I knew very little about. I left her office, applied for the program, and just finished 27 years in a field of study I adore. While at FSU I worked on a grant studying early identification of autism and early intervention. This started my career in pediatrics and my specialty training in autism and early intervention, which are specialty areas for our clinic.

During COVID I became Board Certified in Child Language. I am proud of the level of expert care we provide for our patients at Tribe Rehabilitation. We are life-long learners. It is important to stay current with research and be flexible to try new diagnostic and treatment options. We want patients to have confidence in our ability to appropriately and effectively treat their child, knowing that we are not only highly educated, but are working with decades of clinical experience. Our team works interchangeable and communicates regularly so all therapists involved are invested members of the team. Because we provide speech, occupational, physical, and feeding therapy, we have the inhouse ability to meet a family’s needs faster, reduce wait time on consults, and provide interdisciplinary, family-centered care This improves the family’s experience and the child’s outcomes.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

My business partner, Cameran McWilliams, and I met at Wolfson Children’s Hospital almost 10 years ago when we were hired within a few months of each other. Her discipline being occupational therapy and mine being speech-language pathology we found ourselves collaborating on a significant number of our patients, particularly those on the autism spectrum. We started to build a working relationship and tremendous friendship that gave us the ability to almost read each others mind. We saw eye to eye on many clinical aspects which resulted in a high success rate for our patients. We started to be view as a team and patients would request to be on our schedule.

In 2021, Cameran, at a young age, woke up one morning not feeling well and by the end of the day she had lost the ability to walk. After going through various hospitals, doctors, and issues she was still not getting answers and ended up being admitted to a rehabilitation hospital. She collapsed during her first physical therapy treatment session and required recessitate the rehabilitation hospital. She was transported to the hospital where she again coded, but this time the doctor’s fully believed she was gone. As a last effort, as told by her medical team, they gave her a clot buster and she was revived. When telling this story she calls this the day she died, and her doctors still do not know how she lived. She could not walk due to a high number of blood clots that had forms in her legs, of which she had a double pulmonary embolism which should have killed her, but instead gave her a drive to live.

She took months to rehabilitate, during that time we were focused on her health and her family. Then she returned to work and all was back to normal until a random Wednesday, not long after, she says casually, “so I might have throat cancer.” We had been chatting about the possibility of opening a nonprofit. Though we loved our jobs at the hospital, there was so much more we could offer families that was limited in our current situation. When she told me she might be sick I remember thinking, ” Well, that’s that.” I figured we would spend the next year on healing once more. They expedited her appointment to see an ENT and complete a biopsy, and the next week Cameran sends me a text that says, “It’s beign.” That moment was when Tribe was born.

The next week I found a commercial realtor, we looked at a house that was not even on the market within the week. The moment I walked in I knew the house was built for me and this purpose 35 years before I was born. I made a full price off standing in the living room and had a signed contract that evening. I incorporated Tribe the last week of December 2022, closed on the house the last week of January 2023, quit my job April 4th and treated our first patient at Tribe on April 10. It is all we dreamed it would be and more. Putting the clinic in a historic riverside home has created a feel that is welcoming and fun for patients. We truly are a Tribe. Through the nonprofit we provide family meet and greet, toddler playgroups, and holiday parties. We are able to meet practical needs through toy donations, meal cars, providing transportation vouchers. We had donations to give our families Publix gift cards for Thanksgiving, and have sent dinners to families with a child in the NICU. We use donor money to provide free experiences like have Santa come to Tribe for a sensory friendly experience for our families. We provide an atmosphere of acceptance and celebration of our differing exceptionalities. Families have conversations with us they may not have felt comfortable having in a sterile medical environment. We have grandparents, uncles and aunts, babysitters, ABA therapist, siblings, and friends join our sessions. We allow the family to be who they are and where they are, accepting them as they are. It is important to be heard, and in our safe space we how our families feel we listen. There is endless potential to do good in this world and we are so grateful to be doing a small piece of that at Tribe.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

The largest obstacle we have had in opening Tribe Rehabilitation is working with insurance companies. Medical costs are a tremendous burden to families and we believe it is important to use the insurance as much as possible to maximize their benefits. We have found this system to be difficult to navigate. Each company works differently, has different procedures, and pays differently. The requirements are varied based on the company and the services being requested, and this sometimes will change. Coverage will sometimes be cancelled or changed and we were not aware. Communication is hard and time consuming. Payments can be low, inconsistent or denied for unknown reasons. The family is considered responsible for what the insurance does not cover, and though this is how the health care system works, it is a burden to an already stressed family dealing with a child who has special needs. At Tribe we solve as many of the issues as we can for the family versus simply sending them a bill. We try to rebill visits or alter our notes for better coverage. It takes time and energy to recover insurance money, and sometimes we simply are not successful. Navigating the insurance world is a fight, but one we feel is important to fight.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.inthetribe.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/triberehabilitation/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Tribe-Rehabilitation-100089382038908/