This is an exclusive BHB+ story

Autism diagnostics in the U.S. are ripe for innovation. There is no shortage of new tests, tools and tech that seek to get a potential autism spectrum disorder diagnosed faster, more accurately, more specifically, or earlier in a child’s life.

The day when any number of the companies vying to change this space revolutionizes this part of the patient journey can’t come soon enough. But as with many challenges in autism therapy — and boy, are there many — we need to hold that hope close at heart and keep it in check.

We are still years and years away from that day.

I know a fraction of what this process looks like. On top of my love of puns and devastating good looks (I kid), I handed down my genetic tendency toward ADHD. This is something that I was diagnosed with as a child, have struggled with all my life, and considered in my discussion of potential parenthood with my wife. Knowing that ADHD is quite heritable, we kept an eye out for key early indicators with our children.

The process of getting a diagnosis for my child matches the stories of other parents and the observations of many industry insiders. It took a long time to get in front of a diagnostician. The actual process was convoluted. Still, the results felt generic and didn’t speak to my child’s specific capacities and needs.

Had I known what I know now, I would have looked for additional clarity from a more tech-forward solution, at the very least to add clarity and provide specific recommendations on the course of action I ought to take as a parent. Luckily, with the help of behavioral health professionals, his pediatricians, and his long-suffering teachers at school and church, my child is doing very well in school and in his extracurriculars.

And while I was able to get my child the ideal services following a diagnosis, many families with neurodivergent children are still waiting for an answer. However, advancements in technology and new models could hold promise in the future.

New advancements in diagnostics could also pose a new business opportunity for providers and innovators.

In this BHB+ Update, I’m going to explore:

— Where the autism diagnostic industry is today

— The barriers to innovation

— The dampening power of care access issues

Innovations galore

The health care industry has seen technology adoption take off in remarkable ways in the past 20 years. The problem is that the industry is still 20 years behind the rest of the economy in its tech adoption.

Behavioral health is no exception.

So, we are still in a place where simply adapting analog processes to the digital world is a meaningful innovation. In the autism therapy industry, this means more: through technology, providers have the chance to defeat geographic access challenges and social determinants of health, such as travel and work challenges.

Richmond, Virginia-based AnswersNow launched to provide its own brand of applied behavior analysis (ABA) through virtual, one-on-one visits with board-certified behavior analysts (BCBAs). It did so without a diagnostics service in 2017. CEO and founder Jeff Beck told Behavioral Health Business that the company will build a diagnostics service in 2026.

“Access continues to be a real challenge for these families,” Beck said. “But the vast majority of folks are still looking for that care in person.”

Waitlists for such care are common and can delay the benefit of earlier interventions for autism and the other conditions that seem to go in parallel with the condition and share its symptoms. One survey found that about 60% of children waited 7 months or more to get an autism evaluation.

“Getting an autism diagnosis does two things, broadly, for a family,” Beck said. “It gives you answers and it gives you access.”

One of the latest innovations in this space that caught my attention is NeuroSpectrum Insights. The company filed for an IPO in June 2025. It claims that its software can identify autism by analyzing structural MRIs of children with 90% accuracy and in children as young as nine months old.

The company is seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market its software as a medical device. It applied for 510(k) clearance in March 2025. Specifically, it refers to this software as a computer-aided diagnostic system.

Others yet continue to get traction.

EarliTec Diagnostics — which recently rebranded to EarliPoint Health and is under the leadership of a new CEO — uses eye tracking technology that is presently designed and approved by the FDA for use in children aged 16 to 30 months who are suspected of having autism.

Specifically, children watch short videos of social interactions on a tablet. Embedded eye-tracking monitors where the child looks to evaluate social engagement, verbal skills and nonverbal learning abilities. It captures eye movement 120 times per second, revealing subtle visual attention patterns that are invisible to the human eye. The data are compared against those from typically developing children to help identify early indicators of autism.

Such technologies help “objectify the subjective,” Jonathan Lehmann, vice president of sales for EarliPoint, previously told BHB.

However, technology, including EarliPoint, doesn’t yet stand on its own as a way to get a diagnosis that will stand up to scrutiny within the autism therapy payer-provider dynamic.

Barriers to bring down

As with everything in the autism therapy space, many issues tie back to the relationship the industry has with health plans and Medicaid departments. I didn’t appreciate the depth and power of that connection until more recent reporting shows that nearly every bit of ABA is covered on an in-network basis. So, if the payer says that something doesn’t fly, odds are that it can’t survive in the industry. The same applied to these technologies.

For the most part, health plans do not accept these types of diagnostic technologies in place of the tried and true standardized assessments, such as the ADOS, Vineland, M-CHAT and a whole alphabet soup of other approaches to assessing autism. And to a degree, that’s not what these technologies are trying to do.

At this point, companies that have faced the rigor of an FDA clearance of some kind — EarliPoint Health and Cognoa for example — are cleared as aids but not standalone diagnostic devices. Even if they were, it’s an open question whether current skepticism that payers have about autism therapy would allow for a new group of entrants to the marketplace.

My hope is that the fundamental mission of adding objectivity and diagnostic processes that are more in line with other types of physical health care diagnostics will overcome hesitancy in the face of innovation.

My wild hope, letting my imagination run wild, is that a stronger and more objective first step in the autism patient lifecycle will accelerate the development of a value-based care model, further pushing providers to focus on quality and outcomes rather than volume and access.

Avoid the bridge to nowhere

In at least a small part, the incursion of private investment — especially private equity — into autism therapy services accelerated interest in everything related to addressing the condition. But what hasn’t necessarily happened is a fundamental shift toward merging diagnostics of autism to the treatment of its symptoms.

The majority of providers qualified to diagnose autism — neurodevelopmental pediatricians, developmental-behavioral pediatricians, pediatric psychiatrists, child neurologists, etc. — practice at consolidated health systems or academic health centers. Within behavioral health, there is a shortage of pediatric specialties.

And after an enhanced diagnosis, much of the country either faces a shortage of autism therapy services or severe challenges in matching clinical availability to patient demand.

“Everyone looks at the long wait lists [for diagnosis] and believes there has to be a better way to get critical services started for families and that there’s valuable time lost. But you can’t look at that period of waiting in isolation,” Vijay Ravindran, CEO of pediatric behavioral health VR company Floreo, told BHB. “We have to be cognizant that this will, in a good way, lead to quicker identification of children that need services, but in a system where there are already long wait times for services.”

The challenges of service access, both availability and awareness of availability, are too systemic for venture-backed startups to solve. Addressing access requires a new social movement to activate the power and funding residing in the federal and state governments. To some degree, we can be confident that this hurdle too is at the very least destructible.

The whole reason this industry exists in the first place is the passion and expertise of parents and clinicians united in a common cause and in alignment with other powerful stakeholders. This is how we got the state mandates for coverage of autism therapy.

Depending on how you look at it — as fortunate or unfortunate — that is the scale of solution required to get the most of the latest in diagnostic technology. Until then, we hope and we work on our own little way to get to where we want the world to be.