The Autism Clinic at catalyst

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Welcome to The Autism Clinic at Catalyst (TACC)! We are looking forward to meeting you and your child. We know that this process can be overwhelming and we’d like to do our best to walk you through each step. We want to introduce ourselves, share our philosophy and approach, and try to minimize confusion or surprises. 

Though the end result of your time at TACC is to determine whether or not your child is Autistic, our primary goal is to get know your child; their passions, interests, and strengths and help guide you in providing the most appropriate supports to help your child thrive in the spaces that are most important to them. 

We take a neurodivergent affirming approach and strive to conduct our clinic in a way that honors each child as an individual. We believe children should be referred to support services only if we believe that those services will help your child thrive–not to make them look more neurotypical. Even if your child is not Autistic, we may recommend services that could be helpful for your child.

We do want you to know that we already think your child is awesome and can’t wait to hear all the details of their awesomeness that you will share with us, but as part of the diagnostic process, we will also need to talk about challenges, struggles, and difficulties your child may be experiencing. We do our best to have these conversations in spaces outside of the child’s earshot because we don’t want these conversations to influence the way your child feels about themself.

We try to make your child’s time here at the clinic as fun as possible. We’ve included a space in your intake paperwork where you can let us know the things your child enjoys most so we can do our best to have those things prepared when your child arrives.

• Your first visit will be conducted on telehealth and will last around an hour. Your provider will ask follow up questions based on the information we collect from the intake packet. Their goal is to gain a deep understanding of your child’s medical and social history and specifically what your concerns may be. They will also be able to begin to answer questions that you may have.
• Next, you and your child will come into the clinic at 1900 D Street to meet with our Speech Language Pathologist and Occupational Therapist. Your child will spend around 90 minutes with each provider with a 15 minute break in between. The clinicians will engage your child in play and a combination of structured and unstructured activities in order to observe your child’s language, movement, and behavior. They will also get a snack! You may be in the room with your child during this time or wait in a separate room depending on what you and your child are most comfortable with. The visits will be recorded as this can be a helpful tool for us to refer back to later when scoring assessments. Our Nurse Practitioner will join for a part of your child’s Speech appointment and part of their Occupational therapy appointment.
• After your in-person appointment at the clinic, your clinical team will meet and discuss what each clinician observed. We will combine all our information into one document for you to review.
• Finally, our Nurse Practitioner will meet with the grown-ups again. This visit can be in person or via telehealth depending on your preference. During this visit, we will review all of the testing that was completed, if your child meets diagnostic criteria for Autism and what our recommendations are. Our goal is to make sure that you feel comfortable with what the best next steps might be for your child and family. Along with a copy of the report, you will also receive a packet of information with local and online resources for your review. 
• It is important that you know we try to provide as much information as possible and to help you make decisions that are best for your child, but our recommendations and resources are not a checklist of MUST do items. We trust that you know your child best and are most equipped to discern which recommendations are the most valuable to your child and your family. We are here to guide you along the way.

• The most straight forward way for you to get scheduled is to ask your doctor to fax us a referral for an Autism evaluation (fax number: 360-312-3848). Once we receive that we will contact you to guide you through the next steps.
• If you need assistance acquiring a referral, please feel free to reach out directly to us by phone or email. We will gladly assist you with this. (Ph: 360-389-3468 or info@catalysttherapies.org)
• Once we have your referral, we will reach out by phone to ask some questions, give you a little more information about what this process looks like and get you scheduled. Our clinic is running on Wednesdays and Thursdays only. What questions will I be asked?
• After that phone call, we will email you a few things including our intake packet and a couple questionnaires. Please return those to us as soon as possible!
• After that, you are all set and we will look forward to seeing you in clinic!

• Please visit our insurance page to keep up to date with what insurance payors we are in-network with. This list should be growing over the next few months.
• We are happy to provide a 10% prompt pay discount for those who wish to pay out of pocket or we can send a courtesy bill to your insurance to utilize your out of network benefits.
• We will do our best to check your benefits and explain them to you ahead of time, but it is always beneficial for you to check your benefits as well. If your insurance company needs treatment codes to give you detailed information the following list are the most likely codes we will bill but may not be exhaustive: 99205, 99215, 99417, 96112, 96113, 92523, 97167, 97530

An introduction to your providers is coming soon!