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Navigating the health care system can be challenging for families of children with autism. On top of the challenges the condition itself brings, going through the multiple administrative hoops and many specialist appointments adds further distress.
UNIFI Autism Care, a new Carmel, Indiana-based autism therapy provider, seeks to provide care and better coordinate care with other specialists. The company approaches autism therapy with the assumption that families “come to ABA services already having that health resource community,” Breanne Heartly, co-founder and chief clinical officer for the company, said on the Behavioral Health Business Perspectives podcast.
The new autism therapy venture launched in mid-2023 and is backed by the Mitchell Family Office. The firm was founded by Mark Mitchell, a serial health care entrepreneur whose exploits include founding U.S. Medical Management and selling it to Centene Corp. (NYSE: CNC) in 2014. UNIFI presently operates a location in Indiana and a location in New York.
Unlike other newer autism therapy platforms, UNIFI Autism Care has opted to lean on partnerships and coordination efforts with other specialists rather than establishing those specialties in-house. In part, the thinking is two-fold. UNIFI aims to avoid care disruptions with patients’ and families’ care resource teams. Also, the goal is that committed external relationships with the rest of the care system will lead to systemic changes in the dynamic between ABA and other provider types.
The company also angles for its partnership approach to help elevate the perception of ABA providers within the field of health care as clinicians. Heartly said better integration of ABA via external partnerships will attract clinicians to its workforce who similarly want to see greater appreciation of ABA in health care.
Highlights from the podcast conversation are below, edited for length and clarity. Subscribe to BHB Perspectives to be notified when new episodes are released.
BHB: So why did you decide to make your career in the ABA space in the first place?
Heartly: I definitely didn’t go into things thinking that I would have a career in ABA. When I entered college, I had an undergraduate major in psychology, and very naively, I went into college with the stereotypical mindset of wanting to help people. But I didn’t know how I exactly wanted to help people with that psychology degree.
It wasn’t until I had the opportunity to engage in an autism practicum that I felt like I was finding my passion. And that’s where I discovered applied behavior analysis.
The most recent phase of your career has been in clinical executive roles. What issues did you see at other organizations that you seek to solve with UNIFI?
There’s been a lack of integration with other health care providers and systems. Unfortunately, in my experience, most ABA services are provided in isolation from other health care services that children with autism traditionally interact with.
Nearly 50% to 70% or so of individuals with autism will have other diagnoses or concurrent comorbidities that impair what ABA providers are able to do in collaboration with other specialty providers that children will naturally see.
We were founded to address the fragmentation and lack of coordination among the systems of care for children with autism. Because we’re grounded in the vision for integrated care, we’re getting really creative about the ways that we think about patient progress, and the ways that we think about patient outcomes; we’re really talking about a whole-life approach. We’re programming in ways for which we consider what it means to be successful and thriving later in life and throughout the entire lifespan.
The company has opted to do this unification through partnerships with other health care organizations rather than providing all of the services that could unify a spectrum of care within the organization itself. So why opt for the partnership role?
Most children come with what Dr. Steven Merahn, UNIFI’s chief medical officer, refers to as a health resource community. That health resource community typically includes a group of health care professionals that essentially circle around any given patient to provide the support that they need — a pediatrician, maybe a neurologist, psychiatrist, psychologist, etc.
Because children come to ABA services already having that health resource community, UNIFI doesn’t want to disrupt the continuity of care or the stability of that existing relationship. We think that there’s more power to helping these teams coordinate and collaborate on a child’s care. We have a model of care to support that approach. So we’re essentially aiming for more systemic change. That systemic change can’t necessarily happen by isolating robust health care services only within our own ABA organization.
Let’s talk about staffing. How has it been trying to find providers and support staff in these earliest days at UNIFI?
We don’t necessarily have a volume of need for staff yet that has posed any challenges. Speaking for myself, and of course, for my colleagues as well, who’ve worked in the ABA space for many, many years, we know that it’s coming: We know that we will get at a patient volume in which we will have perhaps some challenges to meet the needs, as far as our staffing goes.
To this point, the clinical staff have joined us because they’ve been moved by UNIFI’s mission. They’re equally passionate about the need to evolve the work that we do within behavior analysis — to optimize patient outcomes, to be a part of the evolution of the future of behavior analysis through this integrated care model. We feel strongly that clinicians will be drawn to the ability to essentially have a seat at the table with other health care providers in ways that through traditional ABA traditional models they wouldn’t have otherwise had.