Inside ABA C.A.R.E.S. | Culture - Advocacy- Retention- Employee Relations- Systems Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:56:36 -0400 http://www.abacaresstaffing.com en © 2026 Inside ABA C.A.R.E.S. | Culture - Advocacy- Retention- Employee Relations- Systems yes 15f37013-8938-530d-a085-f246625f66e4 Holli Beth episodic false Step behind the scenes of the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit — exclusive conversations with the people and partners shaping the future of Applied Behavior Analysis, recorded before we gather in Boston this August.


Meet the sponsors and organizations behind the Summit, understand the work they do, and walk into the room already knowing who's there and why it matters. Industry leaders, researchers, advocates, supervisors, and autistic professionals — all united by one mission: to support and strengthen the people behind the practice.


Whether you're already joining us in Boston or still deciding, Inside ABA C.A.R.E.S. is your way in. 


Listen to:

  • Get to know the partners and organizations behind the Summit, and the problems they're built to solve.
  • Explore the core themes of C.A.R.E.S. — Culture, Advocacy, Retention, Employee Relations, and Systems.
  • Reflect on your own role in building a sustainable, human-centered ABA workforce.


Press play before August, bring your questions to the sessions, and find out what the room is going to be like. We'll see you in Boston  or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Buzzsprout (https://www.buzzsprout.com) culture, advocacy, employee retention, systems, ABA, turnover, workforce, hiring, BCBA, RBT, applied behavior analysis Holli Beth https://storage.buzzsprout.com/3znkmpoooodpp99256o3s1mg654l?.jpg Inside ABA C.A.R.E.S. | Culture - Advocacy- Retention- Employee Relations- Systems http://www.abacaresstaffing.com Your BCBA Skills Don't Expire When You Leave the Clinic, with Motivity's Catherine Martin Your BCBA Skills Don't Expire When You Leave the Clinic, with Motivity's Catherine Martin Most BCBAs picture one career: more clients, more supervision, maybe a clinic of their own. Catherine Martin took her clinical training somewhere almost no one talks about, and found her BCBA skills mattered more, not less.

Catherine Martin, BCBA, is Go-to-Market Enablement Lead at Motivity, the NIH-grant-funded ABA data and clinical platform used by clinics across the country. She trained at Northeastern and worked across in-home, public and private schools, clinics, and residential settings, then moved to rural Montana and ran into the limits of telehealth. A tool she kept researching for her own clients, Motivity, eventually became her employer, and her role has grown from sales into product, customer success, and enablement. Her throughline: the clinical instincts that make a good BCBA are exactly what make her effective in a room full of engineers, designers, and customers.

Guest host Dr. Allyson Wharam, BCBA, host of podcast In the Field, leads this one. Here is what they get into:

  • The pivot: how the system quietly started dictating her clinical decisions, and what finally moved her off the caseload.
  • What a go-to-market role actually is: the day-to-day most BCBAs do not know exists, in plain language.
  • Clinical skills that transfer: reading a room, putting yourself in the user's shoes, and turning a vague ask into the real problem.
  • Multidisciplinary collaboration, again: how working across sales, product, and customer success rhymes with working alongside OTs, SLPs, and teachers.
  • What non-clinicians taught her: how engineers made her a better behavior analyst by forcing her to generalize her solutions.
  • Why Motivity embeds clinicians: building for the field by keeping the end user in the room, not just on a whiteboard.
  • Supervision does not stop at the clinic door: why Catherine asks for training and mentorship every time she changes roles.
  • Advice for the curious BCBA: informational interviews, saying yes early, and immersing yourself in the world before you leap.

Resources

Find Motivity in Boston

The Motivity team will be at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf. If this conversation put words to an itch you have been feeling, find them and ask what a clinical background looks like from their side of the field. And if you are weighing a non-traditional path yourself, bring the question Catherine swears by: what would I need to be better suited for a role like this six months from now?

Register for the Summit: https://abacaresstaffing.com

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Most BCBAs picture one career: more clients, more supervision, maybe a clinic of their own. Catherine Martin took her clinical training somewhere almost no one talks about, and found her BCBA skills mattered more, not less.

Catherine Martin, BCBA, is Go-to-Market Enablement Lead at Motivity, the NIH-grant-funded ABA data and clinical platform used by clinics across the country. She trained at Northeastern and worked across in-home, public and private schools, clinics, and residential settings, then moved to rural Montana and ran into the limits of telehealth. A tool she kept researching for her own clients, Motivity, eventually became her employer, and her role has grown from sales into product, customer success, and enablement. Her throughline: the clinical instincts that make a good BCBA are exactly what make her effective in a room full of engineers, designers, and customers.

Guest host Dr. Allyson Wharam, BCBA, host of podcast In the Field, leads this one. Here is what they get into:

  • The pivot: how the system quietly started dictating her clinical decisions, and what finally moved her off the caseload.
  • What a go-to-market role actually is: the day-to-day most BCBAs do not know exists, in plain language.
  • Clinical skills that transfer: reading a room, putting yourself in the user's shoes, and turning a vague ask into the real problem.
  • Multidisciplinary collaboration, again: how working across sales, product, and customer success rhymes with working alongside OTs, SLPs, and teachers.
  • What non-clinicians taught her: how engineers made her a better behavior analyst by forcing her to generalize her solutions.
  • Why Motivity embeds clinicians: building for the field by keeping the end user in the room, not just on a whiteboard.
  • Supervision does not stop at the clinic door: why Catherine asks for training and mentorship every time she changes roles.
  • Advice for the curious BCBA: informational interviews, saying yes early, and immersing yourself in the world before you leap.

Resources

Find Motivity in Boston

The Motivity team will be at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf. If this conversation put words to an itch you have been feeling, find them and ask what a clinical background looks like from their side of the field. And if you are weighing a non-traditional path yourself, bring the question Catherine swears by: what would I need to be better suited for a role like this six months from now?

Register for the Summit: https://abacaresstaffing.com

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Buzzsprout-19490902 Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:00:00 -0400 2304 full false The Hidden Risks of Credentialing in ABA, with Matthew Jansen The Hidden Risks of Credentialing in ABA, with Matthew Jansen You found the BCBA, made the offer, and celebrated the hire. Then six weeks passed before they could touch a caseload, and no one could quite tell you why.

Matthew Jansen, MPA, is president and CEO of Acorn Credentialing Solutions, a credentialing and enrollment platform built for hospitals, health systems, payers, and provider groups, with a fast-growing footprint in ABA. He has spent more than 20 years in digital health, patient access, and credentialing, going back to running T1 lines to connect rural hospitals with specialists in Atlanta. Acorn was named to the 2025 KLAS Emerging Company Spotlight. His core argument is simple and a little uncomfortable: much of what we treat as a people problem in this field, turnover and burnout, is really a systems problem. And credentialing is one of the biggest hidden systems of them all.

Guest host Matt Harrington, BCBA, of A-Train sits down with Matthew for this one. Here is what they get into:

  • People problem or systems problem: why a clinician who loves the work still can't do it, and what that does to retention.
  • Unwinding from the axle: how practices stuck in spreadsheets and half-built systems get back to compliant, current data.
  • The single pane of glass: what it means to run credentialing off one live platform instead of siloed tools and buried inboxes.
  • Credentialing as a revenue accelerator: the case for treating your credentialing team as front-line care, not back-office admin.
  • The KPIs owners never see: claim hold denials, recruitment-to-clinic timelines, and payer approval speed, and why Rev Cycle and credentialing have to read from the same sheet of music.
  • The six-week gap: how the ripple from one missing data point compounds into lost revenue and a provider already rethinking the offer.
  • AI with a human in the loop: where automation earns its keep in enrollment, and the compliance lines Acorn will not cross.
  • Buyer beware: the golden-record pitch, software-only promises, and the questions to actually ask a credentialing vendor.

Resources

Find Acorn in Boston

Acorn is a sponsor of ABA C.A.R.E.S., and Matthew's team will have a booth August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf. Matthew's own invitation: walk up and ask what Acorn does differently from every other credentialing company. Better yet, bring the number that keeps you up at night, the weeks between hire and first billable session, and ask his team how they would close that gap for your practice.

Register for the Summit: https://abacaresstaffing.com

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> You found the BCBA, made the offer, and celebrated the hire. Then six weeks passed before they could touch a caseload, and no one could quite tell you why.

Matthew Jansen, MPA, is president and CEO of Acorn Credentialing Solutions, a credentialing and enrollment platform built for hospitals, health systems, payers, and provider groups, with a fast-growing footprint in ABA. He has spent more than 20 years in digital health, patient access, and credentialing, going back to running T1 lines to connect rural hospitals with specialists in Atlanta. Acorn was named to the 2025 KLAS Emerging Company Spotlight. His core argument is simple and a little uncomfortable: much of what we treat as a people problem in this field, turnover and burnout, is really a systems problem. And credentialing is one of the biggest hidden systems of them all.

Guest host Matt Harrington, BCBA, of A-Train sits down with Matthew for this one. Here is what they get into:

  • People problem or systems problem: why a clinician who loves the work still can't do it, and what that does to retention.
  • Unwinding from the axle: how practices stuck in spreadsheets and half-built systems get back to compliant, current data.
  • The single pane of glass: what it means to run credentialing off one live platform instead of siloed tools and buried inboxes.
  • Credentialing as a revenue accelerator: the case for treating your credentialing team as front-line care, not back-office admin.
  • The KPIs owners never see: claim hold denials, recruitment-to-clinic timelines, and payer approval speed, and why Rev Cycle and credentialing have to read from the same sheet of music.
  • The six-week gap: how the ripple from one missing data point compounds into lost revenue and a provider already rethinking the offer.
  • AI with a human in the loop: where automation earns its keep in enrollment, and the compliance lines Acorn will not cross.
  • Buyer beware: the golden-record pitch, software-only promises, and the questions to actually ask a credentialing vendor.

Resources

Find Acorn in Boston

Acorn is a sponsor of ABA C.A.R.E.S., and Matthew's team will have a booth August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf. Matthew's own invitation: walk up and ask what Acorn does differently from every other credentialing company. Better yet, bring the number that keeps you up at night, the weeks between hire and first billable session, and ask his team how they would close that gap for your practice.

Register for the Summit: https://abacaresstaffing.com

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Buzzsprout-19490851 Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:00:00 -0400 2070 full false Why Only 9% of BCBAs Use Data to Set Treatment Hours, with Rethink BH's Dustin Carter and Brad Smith Why Only 9% of BCBAs Use Data to Set Treatment Hours, with Rethink BH's Dustin Carter and Brad Smith ABA calls itself the data-driven field. Then Rethink Behavioral Health asked 390 practicing BCBAs, and only nine percent said they use data to decide how many hours a kid actually needs.

Dustin Carter is the Head of AI at  Rethink First the parent of Rethink Behavioral Health. Before that he was VP of Product, a seat he earned the hard way: he co-founded TotalABA, the ABA software company Rethink Behavioral Health acquired. Brad Smith is a senior data scientist at Rethink Behavioral Health who has spent his career in healthcare outcomes and workforce well-being data. Between them, one decides what the technology should do, and the other reads what the data is actually saying. A-Train's Matt Harrington, BCBA, sits in the guest host chair.

This is the episode for everyone who has stopped believing AI pitches.

Here is what we get into:

  • What the survey actually found: 89 percent of BCBAs report work-related stress, and the surprise is the source — not caseload, but the fear of not doing the work well
  • Clinical work at 9pm: what the write-in answers reveal about where the day really goes
  • The 9 percent problem: why dosing gets set by what the authorization allows, and what "decision-ready data" would change
  • The clawback you never see coming: audit risk, TriCare-grade session notes, and the culture that keeps you off the list
  • Value-based care is coming: benchmarking, peer-reviewed client subtyping, and proving your outcomes before a payer asks
  • AI wallpaper versus real AI: the Tuesday afternoon test for any feature a vendor shows you
  • The questions to ask every AI vendor: whose model, where the data lives, what it is trained on, and what your AI is not allowed to do

Resources:

Rethink Behavioral Health is sponsoring the welcome reception on opening night of the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf — find  the team there and at their booth all week. Before you do, answer one question honestly: if a payer asked for your outcome data tomorrow, could you pull it? If the answer is a nervous laugh, that is your conversation starter.

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> ABA calls itself the data-driven field. Then Rethink Behavioral Health asked 390 practicing BCBAs, and only nine percent said they use data to decide how many hours a kid actually needs.

Dustin Carter is the Head of AI at  Rethink First the parent of Rethink Behavioral Health. Before that he was VP of Product, a seat he earned the hard way: he co-founded TotalABA, the ABA software company Rethink Behavioral Health acquired. Brad Smith is a senior data scientist at Rethink Behavioral Health who has spent his career in healthcare outcomes and workforce well-being data. Between them, one decides what the technology should do, and the other reads what the data is actually saying. A-Train's Matt Harrington, BCBA, sits in the guest host chair.

This is the episode for everyone who has stopped believing AI pitches.

Here is what we get into:

  • What the survey actually found: 89 percent of BCBAs report work-related stress, and the surprise is the source — not caseload, but the fear of not doing the work well
  • Clinical work at 9pm: what the write-in answers reveal about where the day really goes
  • The 9 percent problem: why dosing gets set by what the authorization allows, and what "decision-ready data" would change
  • The clawback you never see coming: audit risk, TriCare-grade session notes, and the culture that keeps you off the list
  • Value-based care is coming: benchmarking, peer-reviewed client subtyping, and proving your outcomes before a payer asks
  • AI wallpaper versus real AI: the Tuesday afternoon test for any feature a vendor shows you
  • The questions to ask every AI vendor: whose model, where the data lives, what it is trained on, and what your AI is not allowed to do

Resources:

Rethink Behavioral Health is sponsoring the welcome reception on opening night of the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf — find  the team there and at their booth all week. Before you do, answer one question honestly: if a payer asked for your outcome data tomorrow, could you pull it? If the answer is a nervous laugh, that is your conversation starter.

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Holli Beth Buzzsprout-19444660 Tue, 14 Jul 2026 05:00:00 -0400 2181 full false Building an ABA Company on Non-Negotiable Values, with Melissa Rigby Building an ABA Company on Non-Negotiable Values, with Melissa Rigby Melissa Rigby, BCBA, is Owner and CEO of Gateway ABA Therapy, a Wareham, Massachusetts provider she co-founded in 2020 and has grown past 50 employees. Gateway delivers in-home, community-based, and center-based ABA for clients ages 0 to 64, built on the Verbal Behavior Approach and a trauma-assumed model of care. A mom of five and a self-described OBM nerd, Melissa also launched The Light, Gateway's learning platform for supervisors, BCBA candidates, and leaders who want the systems without the giant-company baggage. She is a CASP member and a BACB ACE provider. And this August, she is the reason ABA C.A.R.E.S. attendees have on-site childcare.

Guest host Matt Harrington, BCBA, of A-Train sits down with Melissa for this one. Here is what they get into:

  • The gate framework: how Gateway turned five parts of a fence into a treatment and culture model a team can actually remember.
  • Trauma-assumed care: why so many staff arrive carrying it, and how Gateway helps them work through it instead of push past it.
  • Saying no: how Melissa holds the line on a high-hour case when a family's values do not align with the science.
  • Homegrown BCBAs: Gateway has hired exactly one BCBA from outside, and the rest grew up from RBT. That is not an accident.
  • Culture past the whiteboard: the weekly ritual, the values-based shout-outs, and the unglamorous consistency that keeps culture from becoming a poster.
  • Bi-directional feedback: why Melissa asks her own staff to critique her, and what that has to do with setting boundaries as an owner.
  • The Light: what Gateway is giving away, and why disseminating your systems beats scaling your headcount.
  • Growth as a value: the hard, human work of deciding that you might be the problem, and choosing to change anyway.

Resources

Find Gateway in Boston

Melissa is presenting and Gateway will have a booth August 4 through 7 at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, Boston Marriott Long Wharf. Walk up and ask her how the gate framework would map onto your own onboarding, or how Supervision Simplified could take prep work off your BCBAs' plates. And if you are traveling with your kids, this is the team running the on-site childcare room, staffed by RBTs who are first aid, CPR, and Safety-Care certified. 

Register for the Summit: https://abacaresstaffing.com

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Melissa Rigby, BCBA, is Owner and CEO of Gateway ABA Therapy, a Wareham, Massachusetts provider she co-founded in 2020 and has grown past 50 employees. Gateway delivers in-home, community-based, and center-based ABA for clients ages 0 to 64, built on the Verbal Behavior Approach and a trauma-assumed model of care. A mom of five and a self-described OBM nerd, Melissa also launched The Light, Gateway's learning platform for supervisors, BCBA candidates, and leaders who want the systems without the giant-company baggage. She is a CASP member and a BACB ACE provider. And this August, she is the reason ABA C.A.R.E.S. attendees have on-site childcare.

Guest host Matt Harrington, BCBA, of A-Train sits down with Melissa for this one. Here is what they get into:

  • The gate framework: how Gateway turned five parts of a fence into a treatment and culture model a team can actually remember.
  • Trauma-assumed care: why so many staff arrive carrying it, and how Gateway helps them work through it instead of push past it.
  • Saying no: how Melissa holds the line on a high-hour case when a family's values do not align with the science.
  • Homegrown BCBAs: Gateway has hired exactly one BCBA from outside, and the rest grew up from RBT. That is not an accident.
  • Culture past the whiteboard: the weekly ritual, the values-based shout-outs, and the unglamorous consistency that keeps culture from becoming a poster.
  • Bi-directional feedback: why Melissa asks her own staff to critique her, and what that has to do with setting boundaries as an owner.
  • The Light: what Gateway is giving away, and why disseminating your systems beats scaling your headcount.
  • Growth as a value: the hard, human work of deciding that you might be the problem, and choosing to change anyway.

Resources

Find Gateway in Boston

Melissa is presenting and Gateway will have a booth August 4 through 7 at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, Boston Marriott Long Wharf. Walk up and ask her how the gate framework would map onto your own onboarding, or how Supervision Simplified could take prep work off your BCBAs' plates. And if you are traveling with your kids, this is the team running the on-site childcare room, staffed by RBTs who are first aid, CPR, and Safety-Care certified. 

Register for the Summit: https://abacaresstaffing.com

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Buzzsprout-19490811 Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:00:00 -0400 2071 full false Is Your Practice Actually Profitable? The Conversation ABA Owners Avoid, with Camber's Nathan Lee — Is Your Practice Actually Profitable? The Conversation ABA Owners Avoid, with Camber's Nathan Lee — 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-founder of Camber, the revenue cycle company built to take owners off the critical path of their own billing. A former healthcare consultant at McKinsey, Nathan started Camber after watching family friends who ran clinics text people for payroll loans while payers sat on their money. Today Camber runs billing operations for ABA practices across 45 states, with a team of more than a hundred in New York City, backing from Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator, and predictive models trained on over 2.5 billion dollars in real claims data that flag a denial before the claim is ever submitted.

This is the conversation about the difference between hoping you get paid and knowing.

Here is what we get into:

  • Why owners who never worried about cash suddenly are: medical record requests, eligibility denials, and payer tightening across the entire portfolio
  • The spotlight on ABA: what rising payer scrutiny means for your denial rate, and why it is not out of your control
  • The hard conversations: is this practice actually profitable, and why profitable means sustainable, which means paying your clinicians
  • What automated billing actually looks like day to day, and why the fix has to start with the feedback loop, not the appeal
  • The collection-rate truth: 97 percent in eighteen months is not the same as 95 percent in thirty days
  • From uncertainty to security: what the first ninety days feel like on a dashboard
  • The pending-authorization session you deliver anyway: turning a gamble into a math problem you can run with a family in mind
  • Your homework before Boston: one litmus-test question and the two numbers that answer it

Resources:

Nathan's session, From Reactive to Predictable: Designing a Business That Scales Without Burning Out Your Team, runs at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf, and stays on demand all year for registrants. The Camber booth is right at registration, straight across from ours. Before you walk up, sit with one question: do you feel secure about the financial health of your organization? If your honest answer is "maybe," this episode is your prep work.

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

Go take care of your people. I'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> 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-founder of Camber, the revenue cycle company built to take owners off the critical path of their own billing. A former healthcare consultant at McKinsey, Nathan started Camber after watching family friends who ran clinics text people for payroll loans while payers sat on their money. Today Camber runs billing operations for ABA practices across 45 states, with a team of more than a hundred in New York City, backing from Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator, and predictive models trained on over 2.5 billion dollars in real claims data that flag a denial before the claim is ever submitted.

This is the conversation about the difference between hoping you get paid and knowing.

Here is what we get into:

  • Why owners who never worried about cash suddenly are: medical record requests, eligibility denials, and payer tightening across the entire portfolio
  • The spotlight on ABA: what rising payer scrutiny means for your denial rate, and why it is not out of your control
  • The hard conversations: is this practice actually profitable, and why profitable means sustainable, which means paying your clinicians
  • What automated billing actually looks like day to day, and why the fix has to start with the feedback loop, not the appeal
  • The collection-rate truth: 97 percent in eighteen months is not the same as 95 percent in thirty days
  • From uncertainty to security: what the first ninety days feel like on a dashboard
  • The pending-authorization session you deliver anyway: turning a gamble into a math problem you can run with a family in mind
  • Your homework before Boston: one litmus-test question and the two numbers that answer it

Resources:

Nathan's session, From Reactive to Predictable: Designing a Business That Scales Without Burning Out Your Team, runs at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf, and stays on demand all year for registrants. The Camber booth is right at registration, straight across from ours. Before you walk up, sit with one question: do you feel secure about the financial health of your organization? If your honest answer is "maybe," this episode is your prep work.

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

Go take care of your people. I'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Holli Beth Buzzsprout-19444928 Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:00:00 -0400 2286 full false What Happens When a BCBA Builds Your ABA Software, with Shridhevi Veerappan What Happens When a BCBA Builds Your ABA Software, with Shridhevi Veerappan 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 an architect and engineer, which means she is the rare person who speaks both languages in the room: people, relationships, and variables on one side, logic and workflows on the other. She found Artemis as a customer running her own practice. Now she builds the tools she spent 15 years wishing she had. A-Train's Matt Harrington, BCBA, sits in the guest host chair.

This is what it sounds like when your software company speaks fluent clinician.

Here is what we get into:

  • The engineering room: what a BCBA says to a room full of engineers when a workflow is perfect in theory and dead on arrival in a session
  • Why nothing in ABA is linear, and why rigid software does not just annoy clinicians, it breeds workarounds that can do real harm
  • The parent portal as an on-ramp: real-time schedules, messaging, and progress that meet overwhelmed families where they are
  • What clinicians get wrong about software: the four-sprint truth hiding behind "it's just a simple feature"
  • The honest demo: why "it's in our roadmap" beats overpromising, from someone who does sales calls without being a salesperson
  • From AI skeptic to builder: she told her own boss no, and what changed her mind
  • Tokenization, guardrails, and clinician-final-say: the AI compliance questions to ask any vendor, not just this one
  • A Zoom room open 7am to 7pm: what radically accessible support actually looks like

Resources:

Find Shridhevi and the Artemis ABA team at their booth at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf. Before you stop by, write down the one workflow your current software forces you to work around. That is your conversation starter.

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> 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 an architect and engineer, which means she is the rare person who speaks both languages in the room: people, relationships, and variables on one side, logic and workflows on the other. She found Artemis as a customer running her own practice. Now she builds the tools she spent 15 years wishing she had. A-Train's Matt Harrington, BCBA, sits in the guest host chair.

This is what it sounds like when your software company speaks fluent clinician.

Here is what we get into:

  • The engineering room: what a BCBA says to a room full of engineers when a workflow is perfect in theory and dead on arrival in a session
  • Why nothing in ABA is linear, and why rigid software does not just annoy clinicians, it breeds workarounds that can do real harm
  • The parent portal as an on-ramp: real-time schedules, messaging, and progress that meet overwhelmed families where they are
  • What clinicians get wrong about software: the four-sprint truth hiding behind "it's just a simple feature"
  • The honest demo: why "it's in our roadmap" beats overpromising, from someone who does sales calls without being a salesperson
  • From AI skeptic to builder: she told her own boss no, and what changed her mind
  • Tokenization, guardrails, and clinician-final-say: the AI compliance questions to ask any vendor, not just this one
  • A Zoom room open 7am to 7pm: what radically accessible support actually looks like

Resources:

Find Shridhevi and the Artemis ABA team at their booth at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf. Before you stop by, write down the one workflow your current software forces you to work around. That is your conversation starter.

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Buzzsprout-19443457 Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400 2386 full false Where ABA Practices Actually Lose Their Money, with Thomas John Where ABA Practices Actually Lose Their Money, with Thomas John 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, and execution, and he has watched clinics close not because the care failed, but because the cash arrived too late. In 2023 he founded Artemis ABA after seeing the same operational failures repeat across ABA practices. His mantra runs through this whole episode: process first, automation second, AI third. A-Train's Matt Harrington, BCBA, sits in the guest host chair.

This is the episode to hear before you blame your billing team.

Here is what we get into:

  • Revenue as a care problem: clinical capacity is financed by cash conversion, and a wrong bill to a family drives churn just like a bad session does
  • The KPI ladder: denial percentage, days in AR, and net collection ratio, and why a healthy-looking P&L can hide a practice quietly losing money
  • Why denials do not happen in the back office: credentialing, prior authorization, and benefits verification, the three front-office failures behind almost all of them
  • The first 90 to 120 days with an RCM partner: quick modifier fixes, then the harder conversations about scheduling and credentialing
  • AI as the intern: brilliant, tireless, and useless without thirty years of SOPs and payer intelligence wrapped around it
  • Five things to demand from anyone selling you RCM, starting with a partner who does not get paid unless you do
  • Audits: the one thing payers actually test, and the documentation culture that keeps you off their list
  • Falling in love with your AR: why claims past 90 days are probably gone, and the honest math most owners avoid

Resources:

Find Thomas and the Plutus Health team at their booth at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf. Before you stop by, pull one number: your net collection ratio for last quarter. If you have never calculated it, that is your conversation starter.

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> 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, and execution, and he has watched clinics close not because the care failed, but because the cash arrived too late. In 2023 he founded Artemis ABA after seeing the same operational failures repeat across ABA practices. His mantra runs through this whole episode: process first, automation second, AI third. A-Train's Matt Harrington, BCBA, sits in the guest host chair.

This is the episode to hear before you blame your billing team.

Here is what we get into:

  • Revenue as a care problem: clinical capacity is financed by cash conversion, and a wrong bill to a family drives churn just like a bad session does
  • The KPI ladder: denial percentage, days in AR, and net collection ratio, and why a healthy-looking P&L can hide a practice quietly losing money
  • Why denials do not happen in the back office: credentialing, prior authorization, and benefits verification, the three front-office failures behind almost all of them
  • The first 90 to 120 days with an RCM partner: quick modifier fixes, then the harder conversations about scheduling and credentialing
  • AI as the intern: brilliant, tireless, and useless without thirty years of SOPs and payer intelligence wrapped around it
  • Five things to demand from anyone selling you RCM, starting with a partner who does not get paid unless you do
  • Audits: the one thing payers actually test, and the documentation culture that keeps you off their list
  • Falling in love with your AR: why claims past 90 days are probably gone, and the honest math most owners avoid

Resources:

Find Thomas and the Plutus Health team at their booth at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf. Before you stop by, pull one number: your net collection ratio for last quarter. If you have never calculated it, that is your conversation starter.

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Buzzsprout-19443076 Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:00:00 -0400 2731 full false The Security Problem Hiding Inside ABA Turnover, with Tom McCadden Episode The Security Problem Hiding Inside ABA Turnover, with Tom McCadden Episode In 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 multi-state organizations. Tom has spent twenty years inside the company building the unglamorous, mission-critical layer: the systems that decide whether a departure is a non-event or a breach. He has watched ABA companies grow every way a company can grow, de novo and by acquisition, and he has seen what happens to client data when nobody owns the offboarding. A-Train's Matt Harrington, BCBA, sits in the guest host chair for this one.

This is the conversation about the risk your practice is already carrying.

Here is what we get into:

  • Offboarding as two problems, identity and equipment, and why high RBT churn means you cannot solve either one manually
  • The "too small to be a target" mindset, and why behavioral health keeps ending up on attackers' lists anyway
  • Growth by acquisition: when you buy a practice, you buy its risks too
  • BYOD done right: protecting client data on personal phones without surveilling your staff's personal lives
  • Wiring your HR system to your access controls, so a departure closes every door automatically, with a human still watching
  • Phishing tests, MFA, and the HIPAA security rule changes turning yesterday's optional into tomorrow's required
  • The one thing Tom would have every owner do by Friday

Resources:

Find Tom and the Alliance InfoSystems team at their booth at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf. Before you stop by, answer one question: the last time someone left your practice, how long did their access stay open? If you do not know, that is your conversation starter.

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> In 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 multi-state organizations. Tom has spent twenty years inside the company building the unglamorous, mission-critical layer: the systems that decide whether a departure is a non-event or a breach. He has watched ABA companies grow every way a company can grow, de novo and by acquisition, and he has seen what happens to client data when nobody owns the offboarding. A-Train's Matt Harrington, BCBA, sits in the guest host chair for this one.

This is the conversation about the risk your practice is already carrying.

Here is what we get into:

  • Offboarding as two problems, identity and equipment, and why high RBT churn means you cannot solve either one manually
  • The "too small to be a target" mindset, and why behavioral health keeps ending up on attackers' lists anyway
  • Growth by acquisition: when you buy a practice, you buy its risks too
  • BYOD done right: protecting client data on personal phones without surveilling your staff's personal lives
  • Wiring your HR system to your access controls, so a departure closes every door automatically, with a human still watching
  • Phishing tests, MFA, and the HIPAA security rule changes turning yesterday's optional into tomorrow's required
  • The one thing Tom would have every owner do by Friday

Resources:

Find Tom and the Alliance InfoSystems team at their booth at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf. Before you stop by, answer one question: the last time someone left your practice, how long did their access stay open? If you do not know, that is your conversation starter.

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Buzzsprout-19442882 Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:00:00 -0400 2198 full false What Every ABA Owner Wishes They Knew When They Started, with Dan Dube What Every ABA Owner Wishes They Knew When They Started, with Dan Dube 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 their clients would not have to. Today they run ABA Growth Team, coaching owners through the exact climb they already made. Dan came to ABA after 25 years in high tech, so he reads the business like a founder and the field like a parent. Dr. Ally has spent her career in the work itself. Between them, they have seen an ABA company at every stage, from three people to a national organization spanning a dozen states.

This is the conversation most owners never get to have before they need it.

Here is what we get into:

  • The leadership triad: the three roles every scaling practice needs, and why the founder cannot keep wearing all the hats
  • Cash flow in an insurance-reimbursement world, and why bank-balance accounting quietly sinks good practices
  • How much money you actually need in the bank before you open the doors, and why fifteen thousand is not it
  • Diversifying beyond insurance: foster care, vocational rehab, schools, and the funding most owners never consider
  • Clinical versus non-clinical ownership, and what actually predicts whether a practice succeeds
  • The delegation trap that keeps clinicians stuck, and the OBM tools that get you out of it
  • Compliance and audit readiness: getting your house in order before someone makes you
  • The one KPI most owners cannot tell you, the one eating your profit and your outcomes at the same time

Resources:

Find Dan and Dr. Ally in Boston. They are both speaking at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf, and ABA Growth Team is an exhibiting a sponsor . Before you stop by, look up one number: your utilization of authorized hours. If you do not know it, that could be your conversation starter. 

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> 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 their clients would not have to. Today they run ABA Growth Team, coaching owners through the exact climb they already made. Dan came to ABA after 25 years in high tech, so he reads the business like a founder and the field like a parent. Dr. Ally has spent her career in the work itself. Between them, they have seen an ABA company at every stage, from three people to a national organization spanning a dozen states.

This is the conversation most owners never get to have before they need it.

Here is what we get into:

  • The leadership triad: the three roles every scaling practice needs, and why the founder cannot keep wearing all the hats
  • Cash flow in an insurance-reimbursement world, and why bank-balance accounting quietly sinks good practices
  • How much money you actually need in the bank before you open the doors, and why fifteen thousand is not it
  • Diversifying beyond insurance: foster care, vocational rehab, schools, and the funding most owners never consider
  • Clinical versus non-clinical ownership, and what actually predicts whether a practice succeeds
  • The delegation trap that keeps clinicians stuck, and the OBM tools that get you out of it
  • Compliance and audit readiness: getting your house in order before someone makes you
  • The one KPI most owners cannot tell you, the one eating your profit and your outcomes at the same time

Resources:

Find Dan and Dr. Ally in Boston. They are both speaking at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf, and ABA Growth Team is an exhibiting a sponsor . Before you stop by, look up one number: your utilization of authorized hours. If you do not know it, that could be your conversation starter. 

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

]]> Buzzsprout-19366489 Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0400 2906 full false Recruitment Marketing for ABA Owners: Pressure Test What Matters (with Tim Zercher) Recruitment Marketing for ABA Owners: Pressure Test What Matters (with Tim Zercher) 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 lives entirely upstream of your job posts.

My guest today is Tim Zercher, CEO of A-Train Marketing. Tim spent years building brands across healthcare and other industries before going deep on ABA and behavioral health, which means he brings something most of us inside the field do not have: an outside eye, backed by hard data on how candidates actually behave when they land on your site.

Here is what we get into:

  • The exercise that turns "we don't have competitors" into a working list of the five you actually lose candidates to, starting with who your local referral sources would name instead of you.
  • Why differentiation has to be built against what your competitors say, not what is true behind their doors, and what that changes about your messaging.
  • The trap of marketing what you understand instead of what candidates value, and the reframe Tim uses with every client to sort one from the other.
  • What a careers page can tell you that a job board never will, including the data his team collects on how applicants move through a site before they commit.
  • The case for unpolished content, and why candidates trust imperfect over produced, especially as AI floods every feed with the slick version.
  • Where HIPAA and the ethics code actually restrict your storytelling, where they only feel like they do, and how to work inside the lines.
  • A lightweight approval process that catches the cringe-worthy post before it goes live, without burying your creative people in fifty rules.
  • When doing your own marketing stops being scrappy and starts being the bottleneck, and the budgeting question that tells you what fixing it is worth.

A few resources from A-Train if you want to go deeper: Company page: https://atrainmarketing.com Tim Talks: Behavioral Health, Tim's podcast of fast, candid conversations with leaders across the field: https://www.timtalkspodcast.com

Tim and Matt Harrington, BCBA, are presenting the recruitment marketing workshop at ABA C.A.R.E.S., and Tim will be around the whole Summit, so do not worry if the line is long after the session. His advice for getting the most out of a conversation with him: come knowing your basic recruiting numbers and a rough sense of what a solved problem would be worth to you. The advice gets sharper the more real your inputs are.

Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> 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 lives entirely upstream of your job posts.

My guest today is Tim Zercher, CEO of A-Train Marketing. Tim spent years building brands across healthcare and other industries before going deep on ABA and behavioral health, which means he brings something most of us inside the field do not have: an outside eye, backed by hard data on how candidates actually behave when they land on your site.

Here is what we get into:

  • The exercise that turns "we don't have competitors" into a working list of the five you actually lose candidates to, starting with who your local referral sources would name instead of you.
  • Why differentiation has to be built against what your competitors say, not what is true behind their doors, and what that changes about your messaging.
  • The trap of marketing what you understand instead of what candidates value, and the reframe Tim uses with every client to sort one from the other.
  • What a careers page can tell you that a job board never will, including the data his team collects on how applicants move through a site before they commit.
  • The case for unpolished content, and why candidates trust imperfect over produced, especially as AI floods every feed with the slick version.
  • Where HIPAA and the ethics code actually restrict your storytelling, where they only feel like they do, and how to work inside the lines.
  • A lightweight approval process that catches the cringe-worthy post before it goes live, without burying your creative people in fifty rules.
  • When doing your own marketing stops being scrappy and starts being the bottleneck, and the budgeting question that tells you what fixing it is worth.

A few resources from A-Train if you want to go deeper: Company page: https://atrainmarketing.com Tim Talks: Behavioral Health, Tim's podcast of fast, candid conversations with leaders across the field: https://www.timtalkspodcast.com

Tim and Matt Harrington, BCBA, are presenting the recruitment marketing workshop at ABA C.A.R.E.S., and Tim will be around the whole Summit, so do not worry if the line is long after the session. His advice for getting the most out of a conversation with him: come knowing your basic recruiting numbers and a rough sense of what a solved problem would be worth to you. The advice gets sharper the more real your inputs are.

Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> Holli Beth Buzzsprout-19323653 Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:00:00 -0400 2494 full false Why Relationships Break Down in ABA Orgs (with Damona Hoffman) Why Relationships Break Down in ABA Orgs (with Damona Hoffman) 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 disagreement that turned personal because the resentment sat and bubbled for months.

My guest today is bringing her keynote to ABA C.A.R.E.S., and she is back by popular demand. Damona Hoffman is a TV casting director turned relationship and communication expert. She is the official relationship expert on The Drew Barrymore Show, a regular on NPR and Access Daily, a columnist for the LA Times and the Washington Post, and the bestselling author of F the Fairy Tale. She has spent two decades studying how people actually communicate, in Hollywood casting rooms, in the early days of online dating, and inside the data of apps used by millions. Her keynote is called Empathetic Leadership and Courageous Conversations.

Here is what we get into:

  • Why communication is a skill you can build, not a personality trait you are stuck with.
  • What happens when you step into leadership but keep wearing the clothes of your old role, and why your team now hears you differently than you mean it.
  • How the move to screens stripped the context out of how we talk, and left all of us more self-conscious and less connected.
  • The always-on trap. Why your 10 p.m. email lands like an emergency, and the small guardrails that fix it.
  • Building a communication code for your team across generations, cultures, and the Slack-versus-Teams of it all, so a single emoji does not start a cold war.
  • The most empathetic thing a leader can do, which turns out to be plain clarity, and how it ties straight to retention.
  • AI and authenticity. Why leaning on it for the words is one thing, but admitting you did, right now, can quietly cost you trust.
  • Replacing assumption with articulation, and avoidance with accountability, instead of the block-and-delete reflex.

One thing to know before Boston. Damona's keynote is not a sit-back-and-take-notes talk. It is interactive, closer to improv, the kind where you get in the sandbox and practice the tools in the room. So come ready to play.

A few places to find more of her work:

Website: https://damonahoffman.com

Her book, F the Fairy Tale: https://damonahoffman.com/f-the-fairy-tale/

Her podcast, Dates & Mates: https://damonahoffman.com

Damona is returning to ABA C.A.R.E.S. by popular demand to deliver her keynote, Empathetic Leadership and Courageous Conversations, in Boston this August. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> 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 disagreement that turned personal because the resentment sat and bubbled for months.

My guest today is bringing her keynote to ABA C.A.R.E.S., and she is back by popular demand. Damona Hoffman is a TV casting director turned relationship and communication expert. She is the official relationship expert on The Drew Barrymore Show, a regular on NPR and Access Daily, a columnist for the LA Times and the Washington Post, and the bestselling author of F the Fairy Tale. She has spent two decades studying how people actually communicate, in Hollywood casting rooms, in the early days of online dating, and inside the data of apps used by millions. Her keynote is called Empathetic Leadership and Courageous Conversations.

Here is what we get into:

  • Why communication is a skill you can build, not a personality trait you are stuck with.
  • What happens when you step into leadership but keep wearing the clothes of your old role, and why your team now hears you differently than you mean it.
  • How the move to screens stripped the context out of how we talk, and left all of us more self-conscious and less connected.
  • The always-on trap. Why your 10 p.m. email lands like an emergency, and the small guardrails that fix it.
  • Building a communication code for your team across generations, cultures, and the Slack-versus-Teams of it all, so a single emoji does not start a cold war.
  • The most empathetic thing a leader can do, which turns out to be plain clarity, and how it ties straight to retention.
  • AI and authenticity. Why leaning on it for the words is one thing, but admitting you did, right now, can quietly cost you trust.
  • Replacing assumption with articulation, and avoidance with accountability, instead of the block-and-delete reflex.

One thing to know before Boston. Damona's keynote is not a sit-back-and-take-notes talk. It is interactive, closer to improv, the kind where you get in the sandbox and practice the tools in the room. So come ready to play.

A few places to find more of her work:

Website: https://damonahoffman.com

Her book, F the Fairy Tale: https://damonahoffman.com/f-the-fairy-tale/

Her podcast, Dates & Mates: https://damonahoffman.com

Damona is returning to ABA C.A.R.E.S. by popular demand to deliver her keynote, Empathetic Leadership and Courageous Conversations, in Boston this August. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> Holli Beth Buzzsprout-19305753 Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:00:00 -0400 2145 full false Why ABA Training Fails, and How to Fix It (with ABA Technologies) Why ABA Training Fails, and How to Fix It (with ABA Technologies) 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 voices in the field on exactly this problem. Dr. Alison Betz is VP of Business Development at ABA Technologies and the current executive director of the OBM Network. Adam Hockman is their senior vice president of Learning Partnerships and Growth, an instructional designer who will happily tell you that ABA Technologies is not a plug-and-play training company. They are presenting a session at the Summit called From Training to Results, and this is the episode to listen to with your notes app open.

Here is what we get into:

  • What plug-and-play training really is, and why a 40-hour checkbox bolted onto an already bloated onboarding produces content coverage, not competence.
  • Why instructional design is a discipline of its own, and why being brilliant at teaching kids does not automatically make you good at teaching adults.
  • The sequencing trap. Why the skills a new technician needs on day one, like pairing and building rapport, tend to show up last in their training.
  • Why you do not have to choose between exam pass rates and real readiness. A well-built program can deliver both, often in less time.
  • How to actually run the build-versus-buy decision, starting with a number most owners cannot name: what training truly costs you, including the billable hours you lose while people are still in it.
  • The measures worth watching. Time to competency, 30, 60, and 90 day turnover, first-session integrity, and the satisfaction surveys behavior analysts tend to wave off.
  • One thing you can do before August. Follow a single new hire through onboarding like a researcher, and map exactly where the confusion and the handoffs are.

A few resources from ABA Technologies if you want to go deeper:

Company page: https://www.abatechnologies.com

RBT Cost Calculator, to put a real number on what training is costing you: https://www.abatechnologies.com/corporate/cost-calculator

The ABA Tech Clinical Leaders Community: https://www.abatechnologies.com/corporate/the-aba-tech-clinical-leaders-community

Alison and Adam will be on stage at ABA C.A.R.E.S. for their session, From Training to Results, and they will have a booth right when you walk in, to the left. Adam's advice for getting the most from the Summit: come with two or three real problems you are trying to solve, not just one, and be willing to look underneath them, because training is often the hidden factor behind a turnover or compliance problem. 

Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> 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 voices in the field on exactly this problem. Dr. Alison Betz is VP of Business Development at ABA Technologies and the current executive director of the OBM Network. Adam Hockman is their senior vice president of Learning Partnerships and Growth, an instructional designer who will happily tell you that ABA Technologies is not a plug-and-play training company. They are presenting a session at the Summit called From Training to Results, and this is the episode to listen to with your notes app open.

Here is what we get into:

  • What plug-and-play training really is, and why a 40-hour checkbox bolted onto an already bloated onboarding produces content coverage, not competence.
  • Why instructional design is a discipline of its own, and why being brilliant at teaching kids does not automatically make you good at teaching adults.
  • The sequencing trap. Why the skills a new technician needs on day one, like pairing and building rapport, tend to show up last in their training.
  • Why you do not have to choose between exam pass rates and real readiness. A well-built program can deliver both, often in less time.
  • How to actually run the build-versus-buy decision, starting with a number most owners cannot name: what training truly costs you, including the billable hours you lose while people are still in it.
  • The measures worth watching. Time to competency, 30, 60, and 90 day turnover, first-session integrity, and the satisfaction surveys behavior analysts tend to wave off.
  • One thing you can do before August. Follow a single new hire through onboarding like a researcher, and map exactly where the confusion and the handoffs are.

A few resources from ABA Technologies if you want to go deeper:

Company page: https://www.abatechnologies.com

RBT Cost Calculator, to put a real number on what training is costing you: https://www.abatechnologies.com/corporate/cost-calculator

The ABA Tech Clinical Leaders Community: https://www.abatechnologies.com/corporate/the-aba-tech-clinical-leaders-community

Alison and Adam will be on stage at ABA C.A.R.E.S. for their session, From Training to Results, and they will have a booth right when you walk in, to the left. Adam's advice for getting the most from the Summit: come with two or three real problems you are trying to solve, not just one, and be willing to look underneath them, because training is often the hidden factor behind a turnover or compliance problem. 

Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> Buzzsprout-19302603 Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:00:00 -0400 3349 full false ABA Documentation and Compliance: How to Stay Audit-Ready (with Brellium) ABA Documentation and Compliance: How to Stay Audit-Ready (with Brellium) 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 paperwork quietly decides whether you keep the reimbursement, and sometimes whether a clinician keeps their job.

My guest today is Mitchell Mom, head of product at Brellium, an AI compliance platform that audits session notes against payer, regulatory, and quality requirements. Mitchell says they have reviewed close to seven million ABA session notes, which gives them a clear view of where documentation tends to break down and what it costs a practice when it does.

Here is what we get into:

  • Why no team can manually review more than a fraction of its notes, and what changes when you can check all of them instead of spot-checking.
  • The patterns that show up again and again. Notes that do not tie clearly to ABA, sessions that look double-billed, and signatures that do not line up with the actual session time.
  • Why the same note can pass in one state or with one payer and fail with another, and how to think about a moving target.
  • How to coach clinicians without the gotcha. A six-month trend lands better than catching one note from last Tuesday.
  • The link between specific notes and better care. "Mastered X with 80 percent accuracy across three trials" tells a story. "Client did great today" tells you nothing.
  • Why good documentation can even help keep families in care, because parents can finally see the progress for themselves.
  • Moving from reactive to proactive, and treating documentation as protection before an audit instead of a scramble after one.
  • A fair reminder that a documentation error is not always fraud. Sometimes a good clinician simply forgot to sign once.

One thing Mitchell is careful about. Brellium is not there to second-guess clinical judgment or replace your QA team. It handles the consistency at scale that no tired human can, and flags the few notes that actually need a real set of eyes, so your people can spend their judgment where it counts. The goal is never to tell a clinician they failed. It is to point out the few things worth fixing, and show them how.

Learn more about Brellium at https://www.brellium.com

This is Brellium's first time at ABA C.A.R.E.S., and they will have a booth in Boston this August. If documentation is eating your QA team alive, or you keep getting flagged and are not sure why, that is exactly the conversation to have with them. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> 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 paperwork quietly decides whether you keep the reimbursement, and sometimes whether a clinician keeps their job.

My guest today is Mitchell Mom, head of product at Brellium, an AI compliance platform that audits session notes against payer, regulatory, and quality requirements. Mitchell says they have reviewed close to seven million ABA session notes, which gives them a clear view of where documentation tends to break down and what it costs a practice when it does.

Here is what we get into:

  • Why no team can manually review more than a fraction of its notes, and what changes when you can check all of them instead of spot-checking.
  • The patterns that show up again and again. Notes that do not tie clearly to ABA, sessions that look double-billed, and signatures that do not line up with the actual session time.
  • Why the same note can pass in one state or with one payer and fail with another, and how to think about a moving target.
  • How to coach clinicians without the gotcha. A six-month trend lands better than catching one note from last Tuesday.
  • The link between specific notes and better care. "Mastered X with 80 percent accuracy across three trials" tells a story. "Client did great today" tells you nothing.
  • Why good documentation can even help keep families in care, because parents can finally see the progress for themselves.
  • Moving from reactive to proactive, and treating documentation as protection before an audit instead of a scramble after one.
  • A fair reminder that a documentation error is not always fraud. Sometimes a good clinician simply forgot to sign once.

One thing Mitchell is careful about. Brellium is not there to second-guess clinical judgment or replace your QA team. It handles the consistency at scale that no tired human can, and flags the few notes that actually need a real set of eyes, so your people can spend their judgment where it counts. The goal is never to tell a clinician they failed. It is to point out the few things worth fixing, and show them how.

Learn more about Brellium at https://www.brellium.com

This is Brellium's first time at ABA C.A.R.E.S., and they will have a booth in Boston this August. If documentation is eating your QA team alive, or you keep getting flagged and are not sure why, that is exactly the conversation to have with them. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> Buzzsprout-19302545 Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:00:00 -0400 1590 full false Choosing ABA Software Your Team Will Actually Use (with Office Puzzle) Choosing ABA Software Your Team Will Actually Use (with Office Puzzle) 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 Charlene Kurth, the COO. Office Puzzle is an all-in-one ABA practice management platform that brings scheduling, data collection, notes, and billing into one place, and it has grown to more than 800 ABA agencies since 2018. Charlene will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. this August.

Here is what we get into:

  • How to evaluate any platform on what actually matters: functionality, support, and cost, instead of what everyone else happens to be using.
  • Why a demo is not enough, and why you should insist on using a product for a few weeks before you commit.
  • How to weigh what you need today against where your practice will be in a few years, because the software has to scale with you.
  • Who belongs in the room when you evaluate. Clinical, operations, billing, and compliance, and why you should invite your biggest skeptic in early.
  • Why ease of use matters even more in a high-turnover field, since every new hire has to get up to speed fast.
  • How to think about choosing a newer company. New is not automatically risky, but longevity matters when your data is on the line.
  • The sales philosophy Charlene's team runs on. No quotas, and a willingness to tell you when they are not the right fit.

Office Puzzle handles the business and back-office side, and where they are not the right expert, like billing or accounting, they will point you to someone who is. Their throughline runs all the way through the conversation: you do not have to do it alone, and it is usually worse if you try.

Learn more about Office Puzzle at https://www.officepuzzle.com

Check out their How to Switch Guide: https://www.officepuzzle.com/how-to-switch-guide

Office Puzzle will have a booth right when you walk in at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August, and Charlene will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel. They are clear that you will not be sold to, so come say hi, ask your hardest questions, and grab some swag. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> 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 Charlene Kurth, the COO. Office Puzzle is an all-in-one ABA practice management platform that brings scheduling, data collection, notes, and billing into one place, and it has grown to more than 800 ABA agencies since 2018. Charlene will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. this August.

Here is what we get into:

  • How to evaluate any platform on what actually matters: functionality, support, and cost, instead of what everyone else happens to be using.
  • Why a demo is not enough, and why you should insist on using a product for a few weeks before you commit.
  • How to weigh what you need today against where your practice will be in a few years, because the software has to scale with you.
  • Who belongs in the room when you evaluate. Clinical, operations, billing, and compliance, and why you should invite your biggest skeptic in early.
  • Why ease of use matters even more in a high-turnover field, since every new hire has to get up to speed fast.
  • How to think about choosing a newer company. New is not automatically risky, but longevity matters when your data is on the line.
  • The sales philosophy Charlene's team runs on. No quotas, and a willingness to tell you when they are not the right fit.

Office Puzzle handles the business and back-office side, and where they are not the right expert, like billing or accounting, they will point you to someone who is. Their throughline runs all the way through the conversation: you do not have to do it alone, and it is usually worse if you try.

Learn more about Office Puzzle at https://www.officepuzzle.com

Check out their How to Switch Guide: https://www.officepuzzle.com/how-to-switch-guide

Office Puzzle will have a booth right when you walk in at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August, and Charlene will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel. They are clear that you will not be sold to, so come say hi, ask your hardest questions, and grab some swag. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> Holli Beth Buzzsprout-19301610 Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400 2907 full false Inside ABA Billing and Payer Chaos (with Christophe of Camber) Inside ABA Billing and Payer Chaos (with Christophe of Camber) 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 Christophe Rimann, co-founder and CEO of Camber, one of our gold sponsors this year. Camber is a revenue cycle and billing platform built specifically for ABA. Christophe says they now see around two billion dollars in ABA claims a year across most of the country, which gives them a view of the payer landscape that is hard to get from inside any single clinic.

Here is some of what we get into:

  • Why a healthy-looking collections rate can quietly hide lost money. Christophe shares one clinic that found about $86,000 it was already owed, and put it straight back into the kids, with new toys, new furniture, and a nicer space.
  • Why he encourages owners to look at collections per payer over time, not just the comforting aggregate number, and which reports are worth watching.
  • How payer rules shift, sometimes weekly, and how seeing claims at scale lets Camber catch a change at one clinic and fix it for everyone.
  • Time to bill, and why getting from monthly down to a few days is one kind of problem, while getting to 24 to 48 hours is really a clinical operations question.
  • Denials, prepayment reviews, and the rising, often invisible labor cost of chasing a claim that could have been clean the first time.
  • What private equity buyers actually look at in your revenue cycle, and why a quality of earnings report can matter long before you ever think about selling.
  • Why Camber put a head of policy on payroll, and how feeding real data to Medicaid directors and task forces can help shape decisions about rates and hours on behalf of good providers.

One thing Christophe was careful about, Camber stays on the administrative side. They do not weigh in on clinical notes or how you should document. This is about understanding the system well enough to help you get paid for the work you are already doing.

Learn more about Camber at https://www.camber.health

A large part of the Camber team will be in Boston this August, including Christophe and co-founders Nathan Lee and  Celina Qi. Their booth is right by registration, so you truly cannot miss it. Bring your hardest billing questions and your suggestions, because they came to listen. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> 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 Christophe Rimann, co-founder and CEO of Camber, one of our gold sponsors this year. Camber is a revenue cycle and billing platform built specifically for ABA. Christophe says they now see around two billion dollars in ABA claims a year across most of the country, which gives them a view of the payer landscape that is hard to get from inside any single clinic.

Here is some of what we get into:

  • Why a healthy-looking collections rate can quietly hide lost money. Christophe shares one clinic that found about $86,000 it was already owed, and put it straight back into the kids, with new toys, new furniture, and a nicer space.
  • Why he encourages owners to look at collections per payer over time, not just the comforting aggregate number, and which reports are worth watching.
  • How payer rules shift, sometimes weekly, and how seeing claims at scale lets Camber catch a change at one clinic and fix it for everyone.
  • Time to bill, and why getting from monthly down to a few days is one kind of problem, while getting to 24 to 48 hours is really a clinical operations question.
  • Denials, prepayment reviews, and the rising, often invisible labor cost of chasing a claim that could have been clean the first time.
  • What private equity buyers actually look at in your revenue cycle, and why a quality of earnings report can matter long before you ever think about selling.
  • Why Camber put a head of policy on payroll, and how feeding real data to Medicaid directors and task forces can help shape decisions about rates and hours on behalf of good providers.

One thing Christophe was careful about, Camber stays on the administrative side. They do not weigh in on clinical notes or how you should document. This is about understanding the system well enough to help you get paid for the work you are already doing.

Learn more about Camber at https://www.camber.health

A large part of the Camber team will be in Boston this August, including Christophe and co-founders Nathan Lee and  Celina Qi. Their booth is right by registration, so you truly cannot miss it. Bring your hardest billing questions and your suggestions, because they came to listen. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> Holli Beth Buzzsprout-19297427 Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:00:00 -0400 2084 full false ABA Payroll and HR Software: Why Bad Tech Costs You Staff (with Viventium + Apploi) ABA Payroll and HR Software: Why Bad Tech Costs You Staff (with Viventium + Apploi) 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 better.

That quiet moment is where retention is often won or lost. And it lives in the part of your tech stack nobody puts on a conference banner. Payroll, HR, onboarding, and pay.

My guest today is Joe Burst, Director of ABA Sales at Viventium, a payroll and HR platform built for healthcare with a team focused on ABA. Through their acquisitions of Apploi and Perks for Care, Viventium has brought recruiting, credentialing, onboarding, payroll, scheduling, time and attendance, and retention tools under one roof. Joe works with ABA clients across the country, and he will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. this August.

Here is some of what we get into:

  • Why ABA tech can lag other industries, and a pattern Joe finds surprising. Some smaller, newer practices are more tech-ready than larger ones that scaled early and got stuck in manual processes.
  • The headache of hiring out of an Excel spreadsheet, and why fast, automated text follow-up tends to beat "when can I find time to call them back."
  • What Joe sees in the data across his clients. Retention is often a real struggle, a handful of companies do it notably well, and people will move for a small bump in pay.
  • Retention levers worth a look. Mentorship programs, tuition support toward the BCBA, and earned wage access, which Joe says a lot of staff use when it's offered.
  • Recognition that is more than words on a wall. A points system for things like referrals, attendance, and on-time notes, redeemable for gift cards, swag, or lunch with leadership.
  • Pay transparency as a retention tool. Putting the actual schedule, service code, and rate on the stub, so "why did I get paid this" is less likely to become a phone call, or a reason to leave.
  • Why Joe puts turnover at the center of the conversation about the real cost of bad tech.

Learn more about Viventium for ABA at https://viventium.com/industries-aba, and about their applicant tracking system at https://www.apploi.com

Joe will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August, and the Viventium plus Apploi team will have a booth. Bring your hardest questions about payroll, pay transparency, and keeping good people, and go find them. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.



]]> 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 better.

That quiet moment is where retention is often won or lost. And it lives in the part of your tech stack nobody puts on a conference banner. Payroll, HR, onboarding, and pay.

My guest today is Joe Burst, Director of ABA Sales at Viventium, a payroll and HR platform built for healthcare with a team focused on ABA. Through their acquisitions of Apploi and Perks for Care, Viventium has brought recruiting, credentialing, onboarding, payroll, scheduling, time and attendance, and retention tools under one roof. Joe works with ABA clients across the country, and he will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. this August.

Here is some of what we get into:

  • Why ABA tech can lag other industries, and a pattern Joe finds surprising. Some smaller, newer practices are more tech-ready than larger ones that scaled early and got stuck in manual processes.
  • The headache of hiring out of an Excel spreadsheet, and why fast, automated text follow-up tends to beat "when can I find time to call them back."
  • What Joe sees in the data across his clients. Retention is often a real struggle, a handful of companies do it notably well, and people will move for a small bump in pay.
  • Retention levers worth a look. Mentorship programs, tuition support toward the BCBA, and earned wage access, which Joe says a lot of staff use when it's offered.
  • Recognition that is more than words on a wall. A points system for things like referrals, attendance, and on-time notes, redeemable for gift cards, swag, or lunch with leadership.
  • Pay transparency as a retention tool. Putting the actual schedule, service code, and rate on the stub, so "why did I get paid this" is less likely to become a phone call, or a reason to leave.
  • Why Joe puts turnover at the center of the conversation about the real cost of bad tech.

Learn more about Viventium for ABA at https://viventium.com/industries-aba, and about their applicant tracking system at https://www.apploi.com

Joe will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August, and the Viventium plus Apploi team will have a booth. Bring your hardest questions about payroll, pay transparency, and keeping good people, and go find them. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.



]]> Holli Beth Buzzsprout-19297373 Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:00:00 -0400 2421 full false Why RBTs Quit in the First 90 Days, and How to Fix It (with Dr. Jacob Bradley) Why RBTs Quit in the First 90 Days, and How to Fix It (with Dr. Jacob Bradley) 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 my guest today has built one of the more important ones.

Dr. Jacob Bradley has a PhD in IO psychology and OBM, founded the ABA recruiting firm PsycTalent, and built a validated pre-hire tool called the Retain Assessment after hearing the same thing from CEO after CEO. We can't keep people. In this conversation he makes the case that RBT turnover is not a mystery and not the weather. It is a first 90 days problem, and once you see it that way, you know exactly where to go to work.

Here is some of what we get into:

  • Why most turnover happens in the first one to four months, and why measuring it from day one, not after training, completely changes the picture.
  • The backfill death spiral. How "just hire faster than they leave" quietly turns nearly all of your hiring into replacing people you already lost.
  • Hiring the right people instead of just bodies. What a pre-hire assessment can actually predict (and what it can't), and why candidates with good retention scores tend to stay two to three times as long.
  • The real math. A conservative $5,000 per departure means losing 20 behavior technicians a month is a $1.2 million problem, before you count the families and BCBAs who leave too.
  • RBTs are your customers. Cost to acquire versus lifetime value, and the break-even day every owner should be able to name.
  • Why the training model sets people up to leave. Forty hours of videos, a high-stakes exam, and the basketball lesson about teaching people to actually play.
  • How to walk into your leadership team and turn HR from a perceived cost center into the most valuable seat in the room.

Jacob is bringing all of it to a free live webinar on June 23rd at 6:30 PM Eastern. It is free and live that day, and on demand for a full year if you are registered for ABA C.A.R.E.S. SHRM credit is available. Come with your hardest questions, because this is a working session, not a lecture, and Jacob loves to dig into the real ones. Everything he walks through, you can take and put to work for free on your own.

Learn more at https://www.fixturnover.com and connect with Jacob on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-bradley-phd

Get your full-year, on-demand access by registering for ABA C.A.R.E.S.:https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you on June 23rd, and in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> 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 my guest today has built one of the more important ones.

Dr. Jacob Bradley has a PhD in IO psychology and OBM, founded the ABA recruiting firm PsycTalent, and built a validated pre-hire tool called the Retain Assessment after hearing the same thing from CEO after CEO. We can't keep people. In this conversation he makes the case that RBT turnover is not a mystery and not the weather. It is a first 90 days problem, and once you see it that way, you know exactly where to go to work.

Here is some of what we get into:

  • Why most turnover happens in the first one to four months, and why measuring it from day one, not after training, completely changes the picture.
  • The backfill death spiral. How "just hire faster than they leave" quietly turns nearly all of your hiring into replacing people you already lost.
  • Hiring the right people instead of just bodies. What a pre-hire assessment can actually predict (and what it can't), and why candidates with good retention scores tend to stay two to three times as long.
  • The real math. A conservative $5,000 per departure means losing 20 behavior technicians a month is a $1.2 million problem, before you count the families and BCBAs who leave too.
  • RBTs are your customers. Cost to acquire versus lifetime value, and the break-even day every owner should be able to name.
  • Why the training model sets people up to leave. Forty hours of videos, a high-stakes exam, and the basketball lesson about teaching people to actually play.
  • How to walk into your leadership team and turn HR from a perceived cost center into the most valuable seat in the room.

Jacob is bringing all of it to a free live webinar on June 23rd at 6:30 PM Eastern. It is free and live that day, and on demand for a full year if you are registered for ABA C.A.R.E.S. SHRM credit is available. Come with your hardest questions, because this is a working session, not a lecture, and Jacob loves to dig into the real ones. Everything he walks through, you can take and put to work for free on your own.

Learn more at https://www.fixturnover.com and connect with Jacob on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-bradley-phd

Get your full-year, on-demand access by registering for ABA C.A.R.E.S.:https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you on June 23rd, and in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> Holli Beth Buzzsprout-19297359 Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:00:00 -0400 3380 full false Choosing ABA Practice Management Software: The Hidden Cost of Bad Tech (with Boost) Choosing ABA Practice Management Software: The Hidden Cost of Bad Tech (with Boost) 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.

Stephen Donaldson is the Chief Revenue Officer at Boost, a practice intelligence platform for ABA, and one of the people who helped build the data tools a lot of you already know. He will be on stage at ABA C.A.R.E.S. this August for a panel called The Hidden Cost of Bad Tech. In this episode he makes the case that for a decade, ABA software only ever got prettier buttons, and that the real shift happening now is software that handles the busywork in the background and only asks for you when a human actually needs to decide something.

We get into what that looks like in practice:

  • The "better buttons" trap. Why a decade of nicer interfaces never solved the real problem, and what changes when the system does the repetitive work for you.
  • The black cockpit. Surfacing only what needs a decision right now, like the credential with six weeks left instead of six months, so your team stops drowning in everything all at once.
  • Why ABA scheduling is a NASA-level math problem, not a calendar problem, and why it is really a data problem underneath.
  • Getting the schedule out of one person's head. What happens to your whole operation the day the person who "just knows" calls in sick.
  • AI as a lever, not a replacement. How one strong scheduler can run three or four clinics, so you grow your impact without ballooning your overhead. We still need humans in human service.
  • The honest read on the fear of AI. It is the speed, not the outcome. We already trust technology with our banks, our paychecks, and our medical records.
  • The contract warning bell, from a lawyer's seat. If a product needs long contract language to keep you, ask why, and learn how to tell a true partner from a vendor.

Learn more about Boost at https://www.boostresults.com

Stephen will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August. Go to the panel, then get in line and ask him your hardest questions, because tech only gets better when the people using it are in the room. 

Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> 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.

Stephen Donaldson is the Chief Revenue Officer at Boost, a practice intelligence platform for ABA, and one of the people who helped build the data tools a lot of you already know. He will be on stage at ABA C.A.R.E.S. this August for a panel called The Hidden Cost of Bad Tech. In this episode he makes the case that for a decade, ABA software only ever got prettier buttons, and that the real shift happening now is software that handles the busywork in the background and only asks for you when a human actually needs to decide something.

We get into what that looks like in practice:

  • The "better buttons" trap. Why a decade of nicer interfaces never solved the real problem, and what changes when the system does the repetitive work for you.
  • The black cockpit. Surfacing only what needs a decision right now, like the credential with six weeks left instead of six months, so your team stops drowning in everything all at once.
  • Why ABA scheduling is a NASA-level math problem, not a calendar problem, and why it is really a data problem underneath.
  • Getting the schedule out of one person's head. What happens to your whole operation the day the person who "just knows" calls in sick.
  • AI as a lever, not a replacement. How one strong scheduler can run three or four clinics, so you grow your impact without ballooning your overhead. We still need humans in human service.
  • The honest read on the fear of AI. It is the speed, not the outcome. We already trust technology with our banks, our paychecks, and our medical records.
  • The contract warning bell, from a lawyer's seat. If a product needs long contract language to keep you, ask why, and learn how to tell a true partner from a vendor.

Learn more about Boost at https://www.boostresults.com

Stephen will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August. Go to the panel, then get in line and ask him your hardest questions, because tech only gets better when the people using it are in the room. 

Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> Holli Beth Buzzsprout-19289013 Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400 2097 full true How to Reduce RBT Turnover in ABA: Brand, Process, and Speed (with Talentcare) How to Reduce RBT Turnover in ABA: Brand, Process, and Speed (with Talentcare) 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 CEO of Talentcare, and after thirteen years solving frontline hiring and retention across healthcare, restaurants, and retail (with ABA as their number one space), he will tell you the hiring problem is not a hiring problem at all. It is a brand problem, a reputation problem, a process problem, and a data problem, all dressed up to look like a hiring problem. Fix those, and Talentcare has the data to show a 20 to 60% lift in RBT capacity and a 10 to 40% drop in turnover inside six months.We get into the real work behind that:
  • What an employer brand actually is, and what it is not. Not your mission or your values. The compelling, differentiating reason an 18-year-old should choose you, written in your employees' words, not management's.
  • Why retention starts before day one. Get an RBT to 90 days and you can get them to a year and 90 days.
  • The four-day rule. The best providers go from completed application to signed offer in four days, not four weeks, because the A players are already gone by week two.
  • The metrics that actually tell the story. Net RBT capacity and turnover, not butts-in-seats, cost-per-hire, or time-to-fill. Plus the cycle times and drop rates almost no one tracks.
  • Why a real career site can out-hire Indeed five to one, and where referral programs fit.
  • Reputation management on Indeed and Glassdoor. Why staying north of 3.5 stars and actually responding to reviews is table stakes for the generations you are hiring.
  • The honest take on AI in hiring. Eric's one test before he uses any of it. Does it make the process more human?
This one is personal for me. The turnover crisis is part of why ABA C.A.R.E.S. exists at all. So I am especially glad to welcome Talentcare to the community this year.Learn more about Talentcare at https://talentcare.com

Eric and his team will have a booth at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August. If you are tired of losing good candidates before you even get to interview them, write down your questions and come find them. 


Register here: We'll see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen. You are not fighting a talent shortage. You are fighting for attention, for reputation, and for the brand that feels right.


]]> 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 CEO of Talentcare, and after thirteen years solving frontline hiring and retention across healthcare, restaurants, and retail (with ABA as their number one space), he will tell you the hiring problem is not a hiring problem at all. It is a brand problem, a reputation problem, a process problem, and a data problem, all dressed up to look like a hiring problem. Fix those, and Talentcare has the data to show a 20 to 60% lift in RBT capacity and a 10 to 40% drop in turnover inside six months.We get into the real work behind that:
  • What an employer brand actually is, and what it is not. Not your mission or your values. The compelling, differentiating reason an 18-year-old should choose you, written in your employees' words, not management's.
  • Why retention starts before day one. Get an RBT to 90 days and you can get them to a year and 90 days.
  • The four-day rule. The best providers go from completed application to signed offer in four days, not four weeks, because the A players are already gone by week two.
  • The metrics that actually tell the story. Net RBT capacity and turnover, not butts-in-seats, cost-per-hire, or time-to-fill. Plus the cycle times and drop rates almost no one tracks.
  • Why a real career site can out-hire Indeed five to one, and where referral programs fit.
  • Reputation management on Indeed and Glassdoor. Why staying north of 3.5 stars and actually responding to reviews is table stakes for the generations you are hiring.
  • The honest take on AI in hiring. Eric's one test before he uses any of it. Does it make the process more human?
This one is personal for me. The turnover crisis is part of why ABA C.A.R.E.S. exists at all. So I am especially glad to welcome Talentcare to the community this year.Learn more about Talentcare at https://talentcare.com

Eric and his team will have a booth at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August. If you are tired of losing good candidates before you even get to interview them, write down your questions and come find them. 


Register here: We'll see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen. You are not fighting a talent shortage. You are fighting for attention, for reputation, and for the brand that feels right.


]]> Buzzsprout-19288939 Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400 2363 full false Prior Authorization for ABA: How to Get Approved and Get Paid (with Silna Health) Prior Authorization for ABA: How to Get Approved and Get Paid (with Silna Health) 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 can render a month or two of care you may never get paid for.

In this episode I sit down with Sagar Jajoo, co-founder and COO of Silna Health, the first care readiness platform in healthcare. Silna handles everything upstream of care. Prior authorizations, benefit checks, insurance discovery, and ongoing eligibility monitoring. Sagar came to this work honestly. His mom is an occupational therapist and his wife works in mental health, and he kept hearing the same thing. The hardest part of the job is fighting insurance to get paid for care you have already given.

We get into the work that decides whether a session can happen and whether you collect on it:

  • Why the upstream work (authorizations, benefits, eligibility) prevents denials at the source, instead of fighting them on the back end after the money is already lost.
  • What ABA-specific benefit checks actually catch. School-setting and telehealth exclusions, self-funded plan gaps, and the cost estimate that lets a family know what care will cost before they start.
  • The real price of a late or denied reauth, now that payers have gotten stricter about backdating and retroactive approvals.
  • The payer-specific rules that quietly sink first-pass approvals. Graph axis labels in Georgia, school-based hours with Aetna, live phone reviews with Blue Cross in Illinois and Texas, a patient name required on every page in Nevada.
  • Why payers are tightening at all. ABA's fast growth, fixed Medicaid budgets, and new scrutiny on the 40-hour model. How to read it with a little less frustration.
  • How to tell a shiny demo from tech that actually helps. Interoperability, who owns the outcome when the AI fails, and how long it really takes to see value.
  • Sagar's challenge to every owner. The 60-page SOP that was survival five years ago will not carry you in an AI-forward world where payers scrutinize every dollar.

Learn more about Silna Health at https://www.silnahealth.com

Silna CEO Jeff Morelli will be on stage at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August for a panel called The Hidden Cost of Bad Tech. The Silna team will also have a booth, so you can bring your toughest prior auth questions in person. 

We'll see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> 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 can render a month or two of care you may never get paid for.

In this episode I sit down with Sagar Jajoo, co-founder and COO of Silna Health, the first care readiness platform in healthcare. Silna handles everything upstream of care. Prior authorizations, benefit checks, insurance discovery, and ongoing eligibility monitoring. Sagar came to this work honestly. His mom is an occupational therapist and his wife works in mental health, and he kept hearing the same thing. The hardest part of the job is fighting insurance to get paid for care you have already given.

We get into the work that decides whether a session can happen and whether you collect on it:

  • Why the upstream work (authorizations, benefits, eligibility) prevents denials at the source, instead of fighting them on the back end after the money is already lost.
  • What ABA-specific benefit checks actually catch. School-setting and telehealth exclusions, self-funded plan gaps, and the cost estimate that lets a family know what care will cost before they start.
  • The real price of a late or denied reauth, now that payers have gotten stricter about backdating and retroactive approvals.
  • The payer-specific rules that quietly sink first-pass approvals. Graph axis labels in Georgia, school-based hours with Aetna, live phone reviews with Blue Cross in Illinois and Texas, a patient name required on every page in Nevada.
  • Why payers are tightening at all. ABA's fast growth, fixed Medicaid budgets, and new scrutiny on the 40-hour model. How to read it with a little less frustration.
  • How to tell a shiny demo from tech that actually helps. Interoperability, who owns the outcome when the AI fails, and how long it really takes to see value.
  • Sagar's challenge to every owner. The 60-page SOP that was survival five years ago will not carry you in an AI-forward world where payers scrutinize every dollar.

Learn more about Silna Health at https://www.silnahealth.com

Silna CEO Jeff Morelli will be on stage at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August for a panel called The Hidden Cost of Bad Tech. The Silna team will also have a booth, so you can bring your toughest prior auth questions in person. 

We'll see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> Holli Beth Buzzsprout-19288921 Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400 2564 full false Financial Clarity for ABA Owners with Ethan of Flychain Financial Clarity for ABA Owners with Ethan of Flychain 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 with Ethan Schwarzbach, founder of Flychain and a proud sponsor of ABA C.A.R.E.S. Flychain calls itself the financial operating system for ABA. Think of it as a version of QuickBooks built specifically for this field, run by bookkeepers who only work in ABA. Ethan's story starts close to home. His dad was a dentist who kept his books in a shoebox for forty years and took a discount on his practice sale because of it. That problem is the one Ethan set out to solve for owners like you.

We get into the numbers that actually run your business:

  • The two figures that tell you almost everything. Gross profit (aim north of 40%) and net profit (aim north of 10%), and what each one is really pointing you toward.
  • Why no single payer should carry more than about 40% of your revenue, and how to think about it when most of your families are Medicaid.
  • What healthy tech spend looks like (2.5% to 4% of revenue) and how to spot the vendors quietly overcharging you.
  • The three-payroll rule. Keep three payrolls in the bank, and multiply your startup costs by 1.25, because you will use the cushion.
  • How to scale without scaling yourself into a cash crunch. The 45-day payback math on every new BCBA.
  • When taking on an investor helps, and when a merchant cash advance becomes a nail in the coffin.
  • The one delegation exercise every owner should run this week.

Ethan's whole philosophy fits on a bumper sticker. "We're here to help the people who are helping people." And his advice for finding him in Boston is even simpler. You've got problems, he's got answers.

Find Flychain at https://flychain.us They'll also be with us at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August, so you can bring your real numbers and ask in person. We'll see you there, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> 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 with Ethan Schwarzbach, founder of Flychain and a proud sponsor of ABA C.A.R.E.S. Flychain calls itself the financial operating system for ABA. Think of it as a version of QuickBooks built specifically for this field, run by bookkeepers who only work in ABA. Ethan's story starts close to home. His dad was a dentist who kept his books in a shoebox for forty years and took a discount on his practice sale because of it. That problem is the one Ethan set out to solve for owners like you.

We get into the numbers that actually run your business:

  • The two figures that tell you almost everything. Gross profit (aim north of 40%) and net profit (aim north of 10%), and what each one is really pointing you toward.
  • Why no single payer should carry more than about 40% of your revenue, and how to think about it when most of your families are Medicaid.
  • What healthy tech spend looks like (2.5% to 4% of revenue) and how to spot the vendors quietly overcharging you.
  • The three-payroll rule. Keep three payrolls in the bank, and multiply your startup costs by 1.25, because you will use the cushion.
  • How to scale without scaling yourself into a cash crunch. The 45-day payback math on every new BCBA.
  • When taking on an investor helps, and when a merchant cash advance becomes a nail in the coffin.
  • The one delegation exercise every owner should run this week.

Ethan's whole philosophy fits on a bumper sticker. "We're here to help the people who are helping people." And his advice for finding him in Boston is even simpler. You've got problems, he's got answers.

Find Flychain at https://flychain.us They'll also be with us at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August, so you can bring your real numbers and ask in person. We'll see you there, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

]]> Holli Beth Buzzsprout-19288826 Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400 2746 1 1 full false