Autism therapy companies will need to provide more services and meet the elevated operating and clinical standards set by years of refinement and sector-leading investment interest.

Providers will have to bring multiple health care specialties in-house to create something akin to medical homes for those with autism, according to a panel of autism stakeholders at Behavioral Health Business’ conference INVEST 2025. This will enable providers to gain scale, create differentiated operational and clinical models that don’t burn out clinicians, and embrace technology to bring it all together.

Bringing more specialties under one roof will require that organizations continue to expand. The industry already boasts several large players, concentrated in specific regions of the country. However, there are no true nationally scaled autism therapy organizations. Yet, as the industry continues to evolve, new giants will likely emerge in the space.

“It feels pretty inevitable to me,” Dan Hartman, partner at Morgan Health, an employer health care investment entity and part of JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), said during a panel talk. “In a highly fragmented industry, scale matters. It has always been necessary, and at times sufficient. But that’s changing, so now you need scale, clinical differentiation and operational differentiation.”

How organizations get to scale will likely look different in the future, Jenna Kokoski, COO of Jade Health, said during the panel. Sustainability, especially when it comes to the workforce question, will be the differentiating factor, she said.

Jade Health is an accreditor of autism therapy organizations. It is also building a database of autism therapy outcomes data to help develop industry benchmarks for care.

The industry faces a shortage of providers, Kokoski said. And while licensure data suggests an acceleration of new providers entering the industry, finding and retaining clinicians for sustained stints will be key to a company’s scaling efforts.

“Organizations, in order to sustain and continue to grow, need to focus on that workforce. What are reasonable case loads and different things like that?” Kokoski said. “In order for any organization to grow and get to that growth, I think the workforce is going to be something they have to focus on.”

In turn, this will prompt organizations to grow sustainably through increased care quality, “instead of the growth coming solely from just a large footprint and how big you can be and how many hours are coming in,” she added.

Behavioral Health Business

Success in the work transcends more than the growth of an organization, Neil Hattangadi, CEO of the multispecialty pediatric therapy organization Cortica, said during the panel.

“Workforce is the biggest determinant of whether an organization can succeed,” Hattangadi said, echoing the need for organizations to set clear clinical expectations, create manageable caseloads and center improving care outcomes. “A lot of these clinicians join because they want to see these kids get better.”

Morgan Health is an investor in Cortica. It participated in Cortica’s $80 million funding round, announced in November 2024.

Diversifying clinical services a matter of survival

Cortica has been able to find success in retaining clinicians through its multidisciplinary care model that consolidates several services for those with autism and other intellectual and developmental disabilities. Some of these include neurophysiology, gastroenterology, speech-language pathology therapy and occupational therapy. The model also includes applied behavior analysis (ABA). The integration of such a model has been key to driving improvements in patients’ lives that clinicians crave in their work.

“What we’re hoping happens over the coming years in autism care is that it goes from siloed to integrated and personalized,” Hattangadi said.

Hattangadi noted that, historically, the industry has focused on very specific services for younger patients, especially early intervention models. Several market incentives have driven organizations to selectively bring on patients with a narrow health profile and maximize the number of ABA hours they can deliver to a patient.

By and large, this leaves a major gap for autistic patients once they age out of early intervention models and start attending school. Thus, as other health issues arise — such as ADHD, fine-motor skill challenges and medical issues, Hattangadi said — many patients and families are left in the cold.

“Providers who are willing to treat up through adolescence into adulthood — that’s a really big missing part today,” Hattangadi said.

Successful autism therapy organizations will likely have to diversify their clinical offerings. And even organizations that remain wedded to ABA as their sole or core clinical offering will have to find ways to do more for patients as they grow. Kokoski said this will have to include increasing the age range of patients and adding supportive services like social skills groups.

“I think it’s clinically necessary,” Hartman said of the autism therapy industry adopting more services. “When we look at the outcomes that we see in the data … when you combine ABA with other specialties, the outcomes for the children are better.

Behavioral Health Business

Hartman added that the creation of a multidisciplinary autism therapy organization creates significant convenience for the families of children with autism. As an investment organization focused on employer-backed health issues, the patients’ and families’ experience within a specific clinical population is a key priority.

He also noted that there will likely be economic considerations for diversifying services. Hartman believes that payers are likely to put pressure on autism therapy organizations to do more for their members in contract negotiations.

BHB has noted that several autism therapy organizations — new and established alike — are embracing more services, especially the SPOT therapies — speech-language pathology, occupational and physical therapy. However, the present fee-for-service paradigm in autism therapy challenges the proliferation of these models.

Technology is the key

The demand for autism therapy organizations requires them to invest more in their business’s infrastructure. This necessitates investments in technology.

The best opportunities for tech adoption with an immediate benefit are in what are seen as low-hanging fruit: revenue cycle management and scheduling.

“There’s still a lot of room to run at most providers in implementing those things well,” Hartman said. “So it’s not terribly whiz-bang, but that still needs to get done.”

Still, these humdrum services are essential to bringing the multispecialty model to life.

“It is not easy to bring all these things under one roof,” Hartman said. “If you have a platform … It’ll make it easier. If you don’t have all of those things in place, what we’re talking about in terms of clinically and operationally differentiating yourself are going to remain aspirational and/or just not economical.”

For Cortica, too many of the company’s workforce are dedicated to revenue cycle management and scheduling. Many of those tasks, Hattangadi said, should be “agentic.”

The company is also finding compelling uses for other technologies. Cortica is using ambient listening technologies to help physicians and other therapists with their clinical documentation.

“It’s so liberating for clinicians to not have to worry about documenting to justify codes,” Hattangadi, who was previously a cardiologist before taking on his role at Cortica, said.