Adapting Direct Services for Telehealth: A Practical Tutorial
Plain Zoom tools—breakout rooms, screen-share, remote control—let you deliver full, high-quality ABA sessions from anywhere.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bergmann et al. (2021) wrote a how-to guide. They show step-by-step ways to run full ABA sessions on Zoom.
The authors explain how to use breakout rooms, screen-share, and remote control for prompting and data. No new data were collected.
What they found
The paper gives ready-made workflows. You can keep reinforcement, prompting, and data sheets alive through a webcam.
They map each in-person step to a Zoom button so you do not lose treatment integrity.
How this fits with other research
Rodriguez (2020) came first. That team built a quick checklist to decide if a client can safely move to telehealth. Bergmann’s tutorial is the next mile: it tells you exactly what to click once the answer is “yes.”
Belisle et al. (2021) extend the idea. They built special DTT and chaining screens for remote work. Bergmann keeps it simple—plain Zoom features work for any program.
Perez et al. (2015) ran an empirical test. Parents delivered FCT through telehealth and problem behavior dropped over 90 %. Bergmann supplies the nuts-and-bolts that let you copy that model with other interventions.
Howard et al. (2023) scoping review warns the field: most telehealth papers lack detail on direct therapy. Bergmann fills that gap with a public tutorial.
Why it matters
You no longer need to pause services when clinic doors close. Open this tutorial, set up Zoom the way they show, and run discrete trials, mand training, or social-skills drills without losing quality. Save travel time, reach rural clients, and keep RBTs supervised in real time.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Due to the pandemic brought on by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), consumers of applied behavior-analytic interventions may be experiencing disrupted access to services. In response to the need for services, behavior analysts and therapists may find themselves treading unchartered waters as they use telehealth to provide direct intervention to consumers. Direct service provision via telehealth extends beyond the bounds of existing telehealth research, which primarily focuses on caregiver training and consultation. In the transition to telehealth, behavior analysts can consider how to adapt an existing evidence base of behavior-analytic strategies from a face-to-face format to intervention via a teleconferencing platform (i.e., Zoom). In this tutorial, we provide practice recommendations, task analyses, and a curated list of Zoom walk-throughs to help behavior analysts construct conceptually systematic learning opportunities in their direct telehealth services. Leveraging teleconferencing features to provide behavior-analytic intervention directly to consumers could spur future research to support these need-inspired practices and guide telehealth applications during and beyond the current pandemic. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40617-020-00529-5.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2021 · doi:10.1007/s40617-020-00529-5