Michael Van Gelder
PMHNP-BC
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.