Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Chris Sullens, CEO of CentralReach (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What size of the market are we talking about? How many of these autism service providers are out there? What is the scope here?

Chris Sullens: Unfortunately, there are no FIC codes that say, “I’m a provider in this unique aspect.” Our estimate in the industry is in the 15,000 to 16,000 range in terms of behavioral health organizations and the BCBA has to be involved in every single case that is provided.

Another way to look at the industry is the volume of the BCBA and the number of people who have that certification. There are about 42,000 BCBAs in the world. In terms of the number of individuals that need help, there are over 1.5 million children aged 3-22 that are on the spectrum.

When you think about 42,000 BCBAs serving the needs of 1.5 million people, the reality is that most of our customers have a long waitlist. There aren’t enough therapists to provide the care required. When you ask the question on the size of the market, I gave you the answer of how big it is today, but the market is also growing by 10% to 20% every year. 

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model? Out of all the segments of users that you have, who is actually paying for your technology?

Chris Sullens: It’s providers of ABA services that are being reimbursed predominantly from insurance companies. If you think of it in another context it would be like a doctor’s office. That is essentially who we sell to.

The users span from everyone who is answering the phone and working to get clients into the organization to clinical staff. These include those that are onboarding new staff, the accounting team that is working to make sure the billing is correct, all the clinicians, BCBA, and the registered behavioral technicians who go out and provide the services to autistic individuals.

From the EMR perspective, that is the core of who we serve. Another use case that would be interesting to talk about is about the one company that we acquired – Avail Support. This is the assistive technology that we just acquired.

It was an Irish-based startup. It was a small two-person company. They had an outsourced development team. They built a nice platform that is designed to enable school-age individuals, the neuro-diverse who are in school, to assist the care that they get in the school setting.

They provide a tool that they can use at home to reinforce what they are learning. This is on the life skill side, so think about learning the process of going through brushing your teeth or introducing yourself to others. These skills are needed in the community.

Another area that this technology helps facilitate is on the job coaching and job enablement side. There is a huge gap and a huge need to try to tap into this large community of neuro-diverse individuals who are significantly unemployed. 80% of those communities have never had a job.

They never earned a paycheck, but they want to. It’s just hard to figure out how to get a job and how to support them and ensure that they are successful in a scalable way. This product is designed to help facilitate that so that they can be more effective in getting a job, keeping the job, and to help them execute daily by leveraging technology.

Think of an iPad that has goals that the company needs the individual to accomplish. One of the clients that uses those is TJ Maxx. They have a video-based content around the process of collecting carts from the pergola and returning them to the store, making sure that the lines of carts are lined up in the right way without having someone to look over your shoulder constantly.

It is a powerful technology to enable independence for those on the spectrum. It also provides support for companies who are looking to increase the diversity of their workforces but need tools to be able to do that effectively. That is the one that we are excited about. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Chris Sullens, CEO of CentralReach
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