Autism is one of the fastest-growing areas in human services. Recently, I had a chance to talk about some of the trends and challenges in the industry with a group of experts—Kelly Blaschko, MSW, Executive Director of Genesee Community Services; Jamie Pagliaro, Chief Learning Officer of RethinkFirst; Jen Gray, Director of Solution Consulting here at Netsmart—about what’s changing in the I/DD industry, and what providers need to be aware of.
Autism: State of the Industry
When Jamie Pagliaro began working in the field over 20 years ago, most people didn’t know what autism was. At that time, about 1 in 1,000 children had an autism spectrum diagnosis. Today, that number is 1 in 36. This rate of growth has led to new legislation, with all 50 states requiring insurance plans to cover applied behavior analysis (ABA) for autism.
“This opens up a huge opportunity for health and human service agencies to step up and meet the growing demand for services,” Jamie said. Here are some trends that providers entering the autism market should watch:
Small organizations consolidating to provide more service delivery
Discussion within the industry as to the most impactful supports and quality standards
Employee turnover, especially in entry-level jobs with high stress
Enter Rethink
At Netsmart, Jen and I were seeing organizations experiencing all of the above—especially staff turnover. Regardless of size we wanted to make service delivery easier for organizations providing autism services and address costly turnover and inefficiencies. So, it was a no brainer that our two organizations needed to partner and address these challenges for our clients.
Among the many solutions included in Rethink are:
1,500+ customizable plans, goals and trainings to save staff time and prevent burnout
40-hour RBT training program
Parent and caregiver portal and engagement resources
Real-time graphing to save time and ensure accuracy
Integrated Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program (VB-MAPP), so you can complete the assessment within the platform
Schedule coordination to save time and increase your organization’s efficiency
Secure, mobile-based application for documenting services at the point of care, signing notes, and collecting data in near-real-time—allowing faster reimbursement
A single, integrated platform
Workforce Management: Real Outcomes
Staff burnout can usually be traced back to insufficient workflows—people using paper, analyzing their data in Excel, or having to use different solutions to pull in information. One thing to remember about your direct service professionals (DSPs) is that many of them have grown up with mobile devices. When you’re recruiting, you want to show that your organization is using innovative technology.
Kelly says Genesee Community Services implemented the Rethink ABA only a few months ago. “I was worried in the beginning about how the staff would adapt, but we have seen a lot of improvement and had a lot of positive feedback,” she said.
When asked about those efficiency and workforce improvements, she gave an extensive list.
Decrease in manual time
Decrease in drive time with the scheduling platform, which can calculate fastest routes and mileage
Ease in tracking data
More time spent with clients
Increase in accuracy
Faster reporting, which alleviates daily workload
Faster approval for payroll
Parent, Caregiver and Family Engagement
Research shows that outcomes increase—and the burden is lifted from your DSPs—when parents or caregivers and families are involved with the care team. The Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) solution contains not only the portal mentioned earlier but digestible 10-minute videos for parents to learn from, as well as a workbook.
In fact, it also includes assessment tools that assist parents in contributing information about their child and help tailor the treatment program from the parent’s perspective.
Genesee Community Services is in the process of rolling out these parent, caregiver and family-centered tools. “The goal is for us to not be in families’ homes forever,” Kelly said. “We would like to teach these families how to work with their children outside of us being there and to gain these skills. So, I’m really excited about this.”
Value-Based Care and Autism
You’ve probably heard the term value-based care as the direction the human services sector is rapidly moving toward—reimbursement that focuses on outcomes instead of hours. As a last note in our conversation, Jamie updated us on the future of value-based care and autism.
“If staffing is a challenge and providers like Genesee Community Services are looking for ways to become more efficient, reimbursing for outcomes rather than hours could potentially help deal with some of the delays, burnout and shortages,” he said. “Families are often paying out of pocket, so they would benefit from ABA training that allowed them to work independently with their children.”
Value-based care would also incentivize providers to become more efficient. It would put pressure on the industry to agree on a set of standardized outcomes, which is something that Rethink and other organizations have been working on and advocating for—trying to establish common metrics for providers.
Whatever the future of autism care, it’s important to stay on top of the changes. This is a fast-growing industry with a lot of uncharted territory. Ultimately, you need industry experts to partner with and keep you informed. And you need the right technology to solve the many challenges that organizations like Genesee Community Services face.
From workforce shortages to parent and caregiver engagement, you’re more likely to succeed with the right tools in hand.
Tricia Zerger is the Senior Director of Human Services Strategy at Netsmart.
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