Welcome to APHA Academy!
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Learn about our Premier Academy Course:
100 Days to Launch Your Practice
Summer 2025 Cohort Enrolling Now
Find all course details below.
More than ever, patients and families need advocates to help them navigate the healthcare system. That means an opportunity for YOU. The APHA Academy will help you become a skilled and savvy patient advocate.
Whether you can offer them medical-navigation assistance, or you can help them wrangle their outrageous (and often wrong!) medical bills – patients and families need YOU and your skills.
You know you can be a great advocate. But are you as sure about your business skills? Can you start, run, and grow an advocacy or care management practice and be confident of success? Whether you’re just getting started or you realize it’s time to brush up and expand your business skills, this program can propel you toward your success.
If you aren’t sure or if you know you could benefit from learning business start-up basics… it’s time to enroll in our APHA Academy course: 100 Days to Launch Your Practice.
Learn more below.
APHA Academy focuses on the business of advocacy and care management to ensure you can start and grow a successful, sustainable practice.
Through online instruction and live sessions, we’ll help you build your skills and answer your burning questions about starting and growing an independent advocacy practice.
You’ll develop the confidence you need to become the advocate or care manager YOU want to be!
Whether you haven’t yet thrown the switch, you’ve gotten a rocky start and your skills need a boost, or you think there is value in understanding better how to make you and your practice more effective or efficient…
APHA Academy is for you!
Join us!
I am very happy I invested in the 100 Days to Launch Your Practice program. The lessons, videos and discussions were just what I needed to give me the confidence to move forward with my advocacy business.
An incredible amount of valuable learning experiences are contained in this course. I am an Adjunct Professor at a local University, and I was still very impressed by the relevance of this course. It was just the right combination of textbook review and experiential learning! I could not be happier that I made the decision to take this course.
I don’t believe that I could have easily launched my business without taking this course. It gave me a firm foundation for starting my business and understanding the key pieces that would lead to success.
Course Details
100 Days to Launch Your Practice
Dates
Start Date:
May 19, 2025
End Date:
August 22, 2025
You can finish in 100 Days!
Course Lessons
25 lessons available to learn at your own personalized pace.
Self-paced with 40-50 hours of instruction in total, and live monthly meetings with your instructor and cohort.
- Videos, podcasts, online coursework, reading, discussion forum
- Includes live Zoom meetings once a month with your head instructor, Stephanie Schulz, BCPA and your cohort
CEs Available
CEs for BCPA Recertification
You will earn a minimum of 10 CEs, up to 19.5 CEs, depending on previous coursework you have completed.
Find more details in the Course Content Questions section of our Frequently Asked Questions.
Curriculum / Agenda
All business, all the time, from legal and insurance, to ethics and marketing, from pricing your services to client discussions, developing your niche, your website, and more.
(Find the complete curriculum below.)
Connect with Others
Connect with other advocates and online learners in a mix of live monthly meetings and the APHA 100 Days online Forum. The online Discussion Forum is only for 100 Days learners in this cohort. There, you can meet other advocates and care managers who are growing their practice and advancing their skills.
You’ll also participate in live monthly meetings with head instructor, Stephanie Schulz, Board Certified Patient Advocate. These monthly meetings are a review of course material, and will give you an opportunity to connect with your peers in your cohort.
Price
This INCLUDES a 6-month Premium APHA membership. (Already a member? We’ll add the free months to your existing membership. See APHA Membership in our FAQs for more information.)
Textbooks Required: The three instruction books in the Health Advocates Career Series will be required for this course. Discounts are available. See “Pricing Discounts” in the Registration Questions on our FAQs page.
Discounts
As you register, you will have access to big discounts on the textbooks, if you need them. (Learn more about the textbooks in the FAQs, Question J.)
More Questions?
What I found particularly valuable was marketing lessons and learning how to confidently converse with clients, both established and potential, and feeling confident in showing clients the benefits of hiring me.
The lessons and exercises offered in the 100 Days to Launch Your Practice course are relevant, meaningful, and provide actionable steps to realize my aspirations of doing health advocacy work for elders. The guidance, wisdom, support and lessons from the real world provide useful tools to launch this dream into reality. Many "aha" moments came during the reading and listening.
Every lesson provided was very valuable! I found the lessons on finances, developing your pricing, and insurance to be the most helpful because these were areas that were very confusing and intimidating to me.
Curriculum
100 Days to Launch Your Practice
Lesson 1
Welcome and Orientation
Lesson 2
Setting the Stage for You and Your New Practice
Lesson 3
Setting Your Goals
Lesson 4
Making Your Early Decisions
Lesson 5
Advocacy Ethics
Lesson 6
Financial Basics
Lesson 7
Setting Your Prices
Lesson 8
Insurance for Your Practice
Lesson 9
Legal Needs and Considerations
Lesson 10
Introduction to Client Acquisition
Lesson 11
Client Assessments and Estimates
Lesson 12
Client Acquisition – Getting Started with Marketing
Lesson 13
Target Audiences, Messaging, and Choosing a Niche (Marketing)
Lesson 14
Branding, Elevator Pitches, and Narratives (Marketing, Messaging)
Lesson 15
Overcoming Objections (Marketing, More Messaging)
Lesson 16
Introduction to Web Marketing and SEO
Lesson 17
Newsletters and Email Collection
Lesson 18
Blogging and Social Media
Lesson 19
Becoming the Expert
Lesson 20
Using Public Relations
Lesson 21
Public Speaking
Lesson 22
Choosing the Right Marketing Tactics and Measuring Marketing Success
Lesson 23
Workflow
Lesson 24
Best Practices
Lesson 25
Let’s Launch!
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