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By JACK HURST
Staff Writer
 

A large increase in fees for treatment of children with autism at the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center has parents concerned and Vanderbilt University Medical Center reconsidering the amount of the increase.

Vanderbilt is in the process of revising higher prices for services related to autism to try to ''rectify a situation that seems unfair'' to the parents of Wilkerson's autism patients, VUMC financial chief Warren E. Beck said last week.

Danielle Hulgan and Rhonda Stanford each said they had been notified that the price of their children's individual speech therapy sessions at the Wilkerson Center is being increased from $90 an hour to $190 an hour. They added that autism therapy is often not covered by insurance.

Hulgan said her 3-year-old son requires ''at least one'' individual session a week, as well as a group session whose newly announced costs have risen from $85 to $115 each. The family's total costs for therapy, depending on whether the child needs more than one individual session a week, will be $1,200 to $1,500 a month, she said.

Stanford is an eighth-grade teacher who travels an hour and 45 minutes one-way from Lafayette, Tenn., for each session. Both women said their children were on long waiting lists to get into Wilkerson and have benefited from the program, which they describe as the area's best. But Hulgan said her child will have to go elsewhere if the price increase isn't modified.

There are about 90 children in the Wilkerson autism programs. Beck said that Wilkerson had been operating with ''large deficits'' before coming under VUMC's billing system this year. He said some of the Wilkerson services also are offered by the medical school's speech pathology department, and Beck said, ''We had to have consistent pricing between the two areas.''

Next fall, he said, Vanderbilt plans to open a new children's hospital, and one of its goals is to be able to allow ''differential pricing'' between children and adults. That, he said, would enable VUMC to bill Wilkerson's autism patients at a lower rate because they would be part of the children's hospital.

Beck said that in the meantime a recommendation has been made to make a similar price modification to help address the concerns of the parents of Wilkerson's young patients.

The hospital now is waiting for the Wilkerson staff to recommend the specific decrease in the new charges, he said, adding that he did not expect to get the recommendation before sometime this week.

Jack Hurst can be reached at 259-8078 or at jhust@tennessean.com.