Background for ABC for Autism
Applied Behavior Center for Autism doesn’t have a “one size fits all” approach; they promise their clients individualized programs to improve the lives of the family. They have a large staff of 300+ people, with therapists across multiple disciplines, including: ABA clinical staff, speech and occupational therapists, and diagnostic testing. So when ABC for Autism decided to switch to a new data collection and clinical management software platform they knew they needed a multi-faceted tool that could meet their needs for personalization. The platform would have to have the flexibility to be tailored to the unique needs of each client, would scale up reliably as they continued to grow, and would evolve with the rapid audits and insurance changes in the behavioral therapy field.
"We couldn't keep spending 100 hours per week trying to make the software work. And quite frankly, it was really irking people." - Kyle Quinn, President, ABC for Autism
The Challenge: Wasted Hours and an Unhappy Team
ABC for Autism’s staff was frustrated with their existing clinical data collection and management software system, which was inefficient and unreliable. The software glitches took up staff time fixing errors from data not importing and not charting correctly. Complaints to HR were numerous and dealing with them was wasting valuable hours each week.
High-wage clinical supervisors were personally spending hours each week talking to the software vendor’s IT team because the problems were so advanced their admin support staff couldn’t resolve them. Clinical staff needed to easily pull and graph data for insurance and billing audits. They needed a system that was quick and reactive, but their current system lagged.
“Imagine an RBT is taking data on a kid's listener responding goals. They hit the data button and then 48 seconds later it finally syncs with the system,” said Kyle Quinn, President of ABC for Autism. “We knew that we were not only wasting a lot of our staff’s time, but that we were paying for it, and that there had to be a better software solution.”
The 3-Step Process: A Data-Backed Evaluation
ABC for Autism invested 140 hours into an effective process to quantify the problems and efficiently evaluate the many alternative software vendors.
Step 1 - Quantify the Problem
Kyle knew he had to start by surveying his team to realize the extent of the issues and the staff time it took each week to find solutions or workarounds. He surveyed staff from both clinical and nonclinical departments, including billing department managers and staff from different locations. The results made it clear that the ROI of not switching was too costly to ignore.
Step 2 - Make the First Cut
Kyle initially identified 24 different software platforms of interest, but as a busy executive, he didn’t have time to rigorously research every potential vendor. He knew at this stage of the process it wan’t necessary to dig into the details of every feature and functionality. He saved time by drafting a carefully curated list of 18 questions which would reveal any of his team’s deal breakers of unreliability and poor customer service. With this list he made efficient video calls with vendor sales rep, and then sent them email followup with 40 additional questions.
“I eliminated some vendors because they did not respond to my email in a timely manner because that’s the kind of customer service I don’t want to work with,” said Kyle. He said it’s also important to also read online critiques and reviews from ABA Facebook groups about the different vendor companies. “Some of them had lots of reports of glitches and errors and time spent making it work, which was exactly like the problems we already had, and I didn't want to go from one frying pan into another,” he said. Especially important to ABC for Autism was finding out about the responsiveness of customer service support.
“I deleted about 8 of the 24 software vendors just because of customer service complaints that were widely reported with those companies.” When this step was completed he was able to narrow down the pool of vendors to the top three.
Step 3 - Compare the Final Round Vendors
Kyle translated his team’s needs into a comparison matrix spreadsheet with 86 rows of crucial features, and columns for each of the three final round vendors. This spreadsheet guided the process of what to look for during detailed vendor platform demo presentations. The matrix mapped each vendor’s features to ABC for Autism’s specific needs and made it easy to compare the final vendors. ABC for Autism then spent additional time testing those top three platforms, before finally selecting the winning solution.
