About | Think Beyond Practice
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Why It's Different

This is not another content library.

Most platforms solve a distribution problem: how do we get information in front of prescribers efficiently. Think Beyond Practice solves a different problem: how do prescribers build the judgment that information alone can never create. Reading about a CO-4 denial is not the same as seeing one on an ERA you submitted and figuring out what went wrong. Watching a video on MDM is not the same as looking at a chart note and deciding whether it proves moderate or high. Clinical judgment develops through experience, not exposure. That is what this platform is built around.

Simulation first

Every core component is built around doing, not reading. Billing Simulator scenarios put you inside an ERA response. Denial Drills replicate the exact moment after a claim comes back wrong. You make a decision, the system responds, and you debrief against the pattern you just exposed in your own reasoning. That is not something a recorded lecture can replicate.

Closed knowledge system

Ask the Archive synthesizes answers from months of vetted clinical content created by and for practicing prescribers. It is grounded in the actual forum record rather than a scrape of the open internet or generic training data, and every answer links back to the source thread.

Built by a clinician

Michael Van Gelder has run a solo psychiatric private practice for seven years. The billing scenarios come from his actual denial history. The MDM framework comes from the documentation he reviews in his own charts. The forum content is the same reasoning he uses at 3pm on a Thursday when a patient's insurance just changed and the prior auth didn't transfer. This is not instructional design. It is lived experience, structured for transfer.

Teaches reasoning, not answers

The goal is not just to give you an answer. It is to show you the reasoning behind defensible decisions under pressure. That distinction matters because no two charts are identical, no two payers behave the same way, and the exam room does not come with an answer key.

Michael Van Gelder, PMHNP-BC

Michael Van Gelder

PMHNP-BC

14 years of experience
7 years solo private practice
Master's in clinical psychology
Master's in nursing
Telehealth psychiatry, Washington State

About

I built Think Beyond Practice because I kept watching prescribers fail at things that had nothing to do with their clinical knowledge. Billing audits they couldn't defend. Denials they didn't know how to appeal. MDM documentation that collapsed under review. These were not knowledge gaps. They were judgment gaps, and no amount of additional coursework was going to close them.

I have been in solo private practice for seven years. Before that, eight years in community mental health where I was hired right out of school, lost the behavioral health director within weeks, and had to build everything from scratch with no support: controlled substance agreements, EHR templates for prescribers and therapists, documentation workflows across eight clinic sites. No one taught me how. I learned by researching everything myself, building it from the ground up, and pressure-testing it in real clinical settings. That is exactly the kind of learning this platform is built to replicate, except now you can do it in a safe environment where the consequences are simulated, not real.

I have sat with a complex patient, looked at a chart note, and tried to decide whether what I wrote will hold up if someone looks closely at it. I have worked through a denial queue at the end of a full patient day. That experience is what this platform is made of.

Think Beyond Practice is not a side project. It is the platform I would have paid for ten years ago if it existed. I built it because it didn't. It turns out other clinicians needed it too.

The Problem

Most psychiatric education teaches information.
Information doesn't prepare you for the exam room.

Reading about how to handle a complex MDM scenario is not the same as working through one under pressure with competing clinical signals and real documentation on the line.

Continuing education in psychiatry has always defaulted to the same format: lectures, slides, post-tests, attestations. The assumption is that if you hear the right information often enough, you'll apply it correctly when it matters. That assumption is wrong, and most prescribers know it.

Billing errors, audit exposure, denial patterns, documentation gaps, clinical reasoning shortcuts under time pressure: these are not information problems. They are judgment problems. And judgment only develops through repeated practice under conditions that mirror real work.

That is what Think Beyond Practice is built to do.

Sound Familiar?

After the courses, coaching programs, and templates... now what?

You may already have:

A bootcamp or coaching program under your belt

Weekly Zoom case calls that mostly stay at surface level

Template libraries for intakes, med notes, and workflows

Medication algorithms, cheat sheets, and reference guides

Those things work — until they don't. And when they don't, there is no system behind them.

The real challenges in practice are when the patient doesn't fit DSM criteria cleanly, when first line treatment fails and the path forward isn't obvious, when comorbidity makes the algorithm break down, when documentation needs to withstand payer scrutiny, and when ethical and clinical risk live in the gray zones.

"This isn't another coaching program, certification course, or template package. It is a professional space for developing clinical judgment. The part no program can hand you in advance."