Virtual speech therapy platform Great Speech announced that it is now an in-network provider within the TRICARE West Region through Health Net Federal Services and is extending its offerings to military service members and their families.

Great Speech offers children and adults, including Medicare members, virtual therapy services for articulation and phonology, executive function, language disorders, Parkinson's disease, stroke rehabilitation and aphasia, and traumatic brain injury.

The company offers unique treatment plans with one-on-one guidance from an individually-selected therapist. 

The TRICARE West Region includes the states of California, Arizona, Colorado, Alaska, Idaho, Hawaii, Iowa (excluding the Rock Island Arsenal area), Missouri (excluding the St. Louis region), Minnesota, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Nebraska, North Dakota, New Mexico, South Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, Washington and the Lubbock, El Paso and Amarillo areas of Texas. 

"Expanding our services to serve TRICARE West region members aligns with our mission to make quality speech therapy more accessible," Avivit Ben-Aharon, founder and clinical director at Great Speech, said in a statement. "Our nationwide network of 200+ licensed speech-language pathologists enables TRICARE members to achieve their speech and communication goals from the comfort of home by removing geographical limitations and optimizing pairing patients with the most qualified SLP for an individual’s specific needs."

THE LARGER TREND

In August, Florida-based Great Speech announced a partnership with neurology-focused digital virtual-care provider American Telephysicians to provide access to speech therapy services to the Jacksonville-based digital healthcare company's members. 

Numerous digital health companies offer services geared toward helping speech-impaired individuals, including speech recognition technology company Voiceitt, which announced a partnership with the video-conferencing platform Webex by Cisco to make virtual meetings more accessible for individuals with speech impairments. 

Canary Speech, which creates speech analysis software, partnered with Microsoft to apply the tech giant's AI technology to expand its machine learning speech models for healthcare.