Feb 22, 2021, 12:42pm EST

About five years ago, when most people were giving little thought to coronaviruses, Abington Speech Pathology expanded into a new service line when it began offering teletherapy.

That decision gave the Montgomery County company plenty of time to perfect its service model before the Covid-19 outbreak arrived last year and telehealth became a necessity.

The company, which formed a separate subsidiary in late 2019 called RemoteSpeech, is now ready to export its teletherapy expertise nationally with the introduction of a new product called VirtualTx.

Orna Azulay, the owner, and CEO of Abington Speech Pathology and Remote Speech, said she is talking with outside investors in hopes of raising $3 million to accelerate expansion plans for VirtualTx.

“We want to take this to a national level,” she said. “There’s a need. There were 350,000 students in need not receiving speech therapy [because of access issues] before Covid-19.” The pandemic, she said, has only made access problems worse.

Abington Speech Pathology — which places speech therapists at schools and other care settings — created RemoteSpeech as a separate entity to target the American and international school market for its virtual speech therapy services. Azulay said while schools in the United States were hesitant to embrace the teletherapy model, international schools quickly embraced it.

“They were already using video and teleconferencing,” she said. “One of our clients is a school in Bahamas. For six years they didn’t have a speech pathologist on the island. We’re able to help kids and adults that would normally have to take a two-hour boat ride to see a therapist.”

Azulay said the company created VirtualTx after finding there was no one place where somebody could go and find all the components needed to offer remote speech therapy services — assessments, evaluations, treatment materials, and service management such as billing — in a virtual and private environment. “Everything was piecemeal,” she said. “We decided to do it on our own.”

VirtualTx is a proprietary cloud-based software application web portal and online environment that helps therapists, students/patients, and school districts facilitate and manage effective programs for speech therapy in remote settings. Azulay said VirtualTx is designed to be “interactive and engaging,” and can in some cases outperform in-person treatment.

RemoteSpeech has grown steadily since its launch as a subsidiary. Azulay said its client base doubled since the pandemic hit, but she declined to provide a specific number of clients, which include school districts and individuals, for competitive reasons. In addition, she said, Abington Speech Pathology’s work with about 30 clients moved over to the RemoteSpeech platform after the pandemic hit. One of its newer clients is the Lower Merion School District.

Kimberly Fraser, the district’s director of student services and special education, said when the pandemic forced schools to close, the district immediately began investigating options for providing services remotely.

“Our district has a long-standing partnership with Abington Speech Pathology and we were thrilled that they were able to connect us to these resources,” she said. Fraser said Lower Merion has had a positive experience with VirtualTx.

“It has allowed us to consistently provide related services to our students with special needs during times when remote learning is required,” she said. “Initially we were concerned [about how school district services would be provided] because like all school districts we were forced into closure. We unexpectedly had to face that we could not access our students in person, which forced us to rethink service delivery.”

John George Senior Reporter Philadelphia Business Journal