Inside ABA C.A.R.E.S. | Culture - Advocacy- Retention- Employee Relations- Systems

Is Your Practice Actually Profitable? The Conversation ABA Owners Avoid, with Camber's Nathan Lee Is your practice actually profitable? Not "is there money in the bank this week" — profitable, meaning sustainable, meaning you can pay your clinicians next year too. Most owners have never had that conversation with anyone. Nathan Lee and his team have it every week. Nathan Lee is a co...

Most ABA software is built by people who have never run a session. Artemis put a BCBA in the room where the roadmap gets decided. Shridhevi Veerappan, M.Sc., M.Ed., BCBA, LBA, is the Solutions Manager for Clinical Products at Artemis ABA. She has spent 15 years in the field, 12 of them as a BCBA, working her way up from intern to behavior technician to practice owner. Before any of that, she was a...

n ABA, we count what turnover costs us in hiring, in training, in continuity of care. Almost nobody counts what it leaves open. Tom McCadden is the EVP and Chief Technology Officer of Alliance InfoSystems, a Baltimore-based managed IT and security firm that has spent over two decades protecting businesses across the country and has built a specialty serving ABA practices, from single clinics to mu...

In ABA, the claim is the last thing to happen. The denial is just the first place you see it. Thomas John is the founder and CEO of Plutus Health, a revenue cycle management company that processes three and a half billion dollars in medical claims a year with denial rates under five percent, roughly half the industry average. He has spent thirty years at the intersection of healthcare, technology,...

In ABA, finding clients was never the hard part. The hard part is everything that comes after you open the doors.  Dan Dube and Dr. Ally Dube built Compass Innovative Behavior Strategies from a kitchen table into one of the largest ABA providers in New Hampshire, then sold it in 2021. Dan ran the business; Dr. Ally, a BCBA, ran the clinical side. Together they made every mistake in the book so the...

Most ABA careers pages are interchangeable. Swap the logo and nobody would notice, because they all lean on the same comfortable claims about caring and culture. The candidate deciding between you, the clinic down the street, and a front desk job at urgent care cannot tell you apart, and they will not work to figure it out. That is not a talent shortage. It is a differentiation problem, and it liv...

We treat communication like a soft skill. Or worse, like something you are simply born with. You either have it or you do not, end of story. And then we watch teams come apart one ignored conversation at a time. The RBT who stops showing up because she asked for a schedule change three times and no one answered. The BCBA who quits because nobody told her what was going on. The clinical disagreemen...

Most ABA training is not really training. It is compliance theater. Staff click through the modules, pass the quizzes, get signed off as competent, and six weeks later they are standing in front of a real client, in a real moment, with no idea what to do. We did not skip the training. We did plenty of it. It just never taught anyone how to do the job. My guests today are two of the most respected...

Months after a session is finished and paid, a payer can reach back and take the money for it. Sometimes over something as small as a missing signature, or a note that never quite said what the session was for. Nobody in ABA wants to spend their day on documentation. Clinicians dread it, owners worry about it, and QA teams are drowning in notes they could never fully read. And all the while, that...

Picking your practice management software might be the highest-stakes decision nobody trained you for. Your whole team touches it every day. Switch, and you risk retraining everyone. Stay, and you may be settling for a tool that quietly slows you down. And every demo looks great, right up until you are the one clicking around inside it. My guests today are Hailu Jardines, CEO of Office Puzzle, and...

Every ABA owner knows the feeling. You call a payer to ask what's covered, get one answer, call back, and get a different one. A rule changes and nobody tells you. Cash comes in the door, so things look fine, until the month closes and the picture is murkier than you thought. Billing in this field is not just hard. It moves, constantly, and usually without warning. My guest today is Christoph...

An RBT opens her pay stub. It says "hours." It says "amount." That's it. She doesn't recognize the number, she can't tell which sessions it covers, and a small voice says maybe she's being shorted. She probably isn't. But she picks up the phone to payroll, and somewhere underneath that call, she starts to wonder if a different company would treat her be...

Picture a bathtub. The faucet is running full blast and the drain is wide open. You can crank the water as high as you want, and the tub never fills. That is ABA hiring. We keep turning up the faucet, posting the same job we posted three months ago, calling it "butts in seats," and nobody thinks to call a plumber and fix the drain. Fixing that drain is not one repair. It is several. And...

Walk into most ABA clinics and you'll see it. Someone with their head down in front of a monitor, doing the same clicks they did yesterday, while a parent waits in the lobby for a word about how their kid did today. We have somehow built an industry where good people spend their best hours feeding software instead of facing families. My guest today has spent two decades trying to fix that. St...

You stared at a spreadsheet. You thought, "I have no idea where we actually are financially." Then you closed the tab and got back to the work that helps kids. That does not make you bad at business. It makes you an ABA owner running without the one role every other healthcare business takes for granted. Someone who speaks the language of healthcare finance. In this episode I sit down wi...

A family calls. They want to start ABA. And before a single session can happen, someone on your team has to answer one quiet question that turns out to be anything but simple. Is this patient actually clear to receive care today? Until the answer is yes, nothing else matters. Not the schedule, not the treatment plan, not the great clinician you just hired. And if the answer comes back wrong, you c...

A family loses their favorite RBT. No one explains where she went. The kid regresses a little. The parent starts to wonder, quietly, if something is wrong with their own child that good people keep leaving. That is what turnover actually costs. Not just a job req to refill. Most owners treat that as a talent shortage.  My guest today says it is nothing of the sort.   Eric Smith is the founder and...