Small Talk Pediatric Therapy will open its fourth location at 4505 E. Third St. on May 4, according to the company’s Facebook post. The property was previously owned by Laserlite, a laser tag arena that closed April 4.
Small Talk has three clinics in Indiana, with two located in New Albany and one in Corydon.
Small Talk CEO Hannah Lasher said the organization is multidisciplinary, offering services to the pediatric community in speech and language, occupational, physical and mental health therapy.
According to Small Talk’s website, the clinic uses child-centered play therapy. With this approach, therapists create a safe environment for children to express themselves through offering toys or activities like drawing.
“With the pediatric population, we use play to entice them,” Lasher said. “We have better outcomes when they are able to play in their natural environment.”
Currently, Lasher said the clinic is building a gym for motor skills, which will include amenities like slides, balance beams, climbing structures and trampolines.
Lasher, a speech pathologist for 18 years, said she worked in the public school system before a local pediatrician approached her about a demand for speech therapy services in Floyd County. In May 2022, Lasher and her husband Patrick Lasher, the chief financial officer of Small Talk, opened the first location in New Albany, which is about a two-hour drive from Bloomington.
Small Talk operates on a hub-and-spoke model, Lasher said. Organizations under this model use a central hub — larger facilities that carry more resources — to support smaller satellite locations, or spokes. New Albany serves as the clinic’s first hub, and the Bloomington clinic is planned to be the second, Lasher said.
Lasher said long waitlists for patients indicate an area needs more providers. While services like Riley Pediatric Primary Care and Indiana University Health exist in Bloomington, she said there remains a demand in the area.
“There's a window of language acquisition that we're just missing,” she said. “Sometimes the wait list is, you know, six months to a year long, and these children are missing that critical time period to acquire those skills and getting further and further behind.”
The healthcare shortage is greater in rural areas, making it difficult for children there to access care. The hub-and-spoke model helps address this gap by connecting smaller rural providers with specialized centers, helping distribute resources to underserved populations.
Small Talk’s Bloomington location will target patients from neighboring towns including Bedford, Nashville and Ellettsville, Lasher said, and the clinic is still determining possible satellite locations for other rural areas.
In the future, Lasher said Small Talk will continue to gauge patient demographics when considering expansion for the Bloomington location.
Teresa Wohlleb, an occupational therapist at the New Albany location, said occupational therapy is currently a growing field as more people begin to understand its purpose. Pediatric occupational therapy helps patients below age 18 develop fine motor skills required for daily life, like getting dressed, eating and writing.
Wohlleb said Small Talk has observed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children born during the lockdown who are now starting school. She said sensory regulation was especially impacted, as those children spent a period of early development in an atypical environment.
Wohlleb said she was promoted to a clinic director position about a year and a half ago, and she will not be a treating therapist at the Bloomington clinic.
In celebration of the April as Autism Awareness Month, Small Talk has planned dress-up days for staff, patients and family, such as “Wear Red Instead Day” and “Sensory Friendly Day” for the week of April 13-17, according the company’s Facebook post.
“We try to make sure and help when the different months or different things come about — that we can help the community understand,” Wohlleb said. “These are just kids who want to play and want to have fun and be able to bring awareness, like, throughout the year.”
As an IU alumna, Lasher said she hopes Small Talk can provide externships, opportunities to shadow a professional, to students in IU’s speech, language and hearing department who need placements for field experience.
“It takes a village to raise a child,” Lasher said. "Parents can't do it alone these days, and we're there to help them and help with resources and support and guide them to help that child succeed and thrive.”
