Aveanna Healthcare, LLC offers home health services across the U.S. and has 7 locations in…read moreVirginia, with the local ones being those in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, and Hampton. Their Virginia Beach location offers clinic-based and home-based services through contracted, home-based Early Intervention (EI) services in partnership with local cities' Infant & Toddler Connection of Virginia programs.
-- TLDR --
The rating is an average of unacceptable admin services and excellent therapist services for a 2.5* rounding up.
-- Services --
At this location, Aveanna provides pediatric services to include occupational, speech, and physical therapies. Aveanna has a team of hundreds of therapists who provide clinic-based outpatient and/or home-based Early Intervention (EI) services (specifically for children under 3), which is a parent-coaching model.
-- Therapists --
Our experiences has been with the Early Intervention (EI) providers. They make a point to check-in at each session about how the child has been doing, what's working/not as far as the interventions, and model interventions based on what the family identifies as the main priority (which fits in with the overall service plan made with the family). The therapists also ask about other therapies that the child is receiving and generally try to compliment those. Sessions end with what with the parents would like to work on until the next session. The success of this model is really dependent on the parents carrying it out, but it also can be the most effective when therapies are incorporated throughout the day and week and not just for a session or two per week (like clinic-based appointments). I found their pediatric speech therapeutic services to be excellent and would highly recommend them! Their SLP was essential in helping us learn child-led strategies that reflected the approaches of Laura Mize. The SLP provided lots of individualized strategies that helped us build up imitation (gestures, sounds) to eventually build to speech.
-- Office Admin --
Working with Aveanna's admin staff was a terrible experience. After following up over the course of a month which culminated in me having to call and speak to 5 different people in the same day, by the end of it, they still were unable to correctly account for what was going on. The staff did not know the services they offered, but worse than just not being able to provide information, they provided lots of misinformation that conflicted with what they had provided in prior weeks. They lost my child's initial files. Their incompetence let to a month's delay in connecting my child to services. I did not follow through on their clinic-based services (which had a 9 month waitlist at the time), and thank goodness, because they also provided inaccurate information regarding their services in relation to my insurance.
-- Insurance Know-How --
Thankfully other providers are well-versed in insurance and what options were available to us, because this office not only delayed our ability to connect to services because they literally did not understand their own services they offered. In case it's helpful, if you likewise want to line up clinic and home-based early intervention (EI) services for speech, you either need EI to not bill your insurance or you need to use Aveanna as your clinic and EI service provider. Also note that if your child is under 3 and you have Optima, your only choices for clinic-based OT are Sentara or CHKD (not Aveanna). We were linked with Aveanna for EI services, which is the only form in which I would recommend working with them.
-- Assessments --
Because we are using their EI services, the Infant & Toddler Connection of Virginia program for our city arranges assessments and service coordination. If you go to Aveanna for clinic-based services, Aveanna would do initial assessments and goal setting with you. As mentioned above, I started this process with Aveanna and their clinic lost the information.
-- Scheduling --
Since we are using their EI services, we schedule directly with each therapist for the next month's session dates. Therapists have always been prompt and keep their scheduled times. If you go to Aveanna for clinic-based services, Aveanna admin staff would work with you.
-- Environment --
If you do home-based services, it helps to have a calm, quiet place to give updates, get info about techniques, and get the most out of the therapies.
-- Conclusions --
Ultimately our particular therapist was a good fit for us using the Early Intervention home-based service model. Thankfully we have a service coordinator through Infant & Toddler. I was told by Infant & Toddler that Aveanna is their largest contractor employing pediatric therapists, so they often have someone to staff your child's case first and are able to accommodate the referrals. It's worth working with Infant & Toddler to contract a therapist there, but not directly.