Our Journey to Revolutionize Autism Care with Appian

Let me introduce you to Jake. He’s four years old, loves puzzles, and sees the world in his own unique, beautiful way. Like one in 31 children in the US, Jake has autism. His parents are told that early intervention is crucial for him to develop the skills and behaviors he’ll need to thrive.

He just needs a little help with things many of us take for granted: pointing to make a request, speaking up, asking for things, making friends. Research is clear: when kids get behavioral therapy as young as two, their progress in these areas dramatically improves. So, Jake's parents seek help. 

But what they find is a maze of roadblocks. Endless waitlists. Frustrating insurance delays. Mountains of paperwork. These kinds of delays are an all too common reality for thousands of kids across the country.

When my business partner, Jamie Turner, and I founded Acclaim Autism, our focus wasn't on technology; it was on people. As a former childhood educator myself, and Jamie being from the nonprofit sector, we had witnessed the pain firsthand: a system bogged down by paperwork and mind-numbing administrative tasks. Organizations seemed to be chasing growth at the expense of quality, drowning in operational and billing nightmares, and losing sight of the very children and families they were meant to serve. The disconnect between caregivers, children, and supporting systems was immense. We knew that there had to be a better way.

Our processes were complex. We had to navigate state and local regulations, federal healthcare laws, diverse insurance company policies, and rules specific to our field. Families, already desperate to start, were met with stacks of forms: insurance authorizations, requests for medical records—the list went on.

This intake process, instead of taking days, stretched into months. Can you imagine being a parent, just trying to do what’s right for your child, reaching out for a lifeline, only to hit barrier after barrier? Even after intake, it could take six months, or even years just to start services. For children in their most critical developmental window, these delays come at an unacceptable cost.

And it wasn't just families caught in this bureaucratic nightmare; our staff were suffering too. Behind every delayed service was a team of passionate individuals spending thousands of hours moving data between spreadsheets, calling insurance companies, and trying to make sense of fragmented systems. This inefficiency and frustration contributes to an alarming average 65% turnover rate in the field. No one enters this profession to drown in paperwork. We are here to help kids, and we were losing our best and brightest to burnout at Acclaim.

We knew we had to do better. Our objective was simple: to build something different. We aimed to scale with integrity, grounded in the values that initially drew us to this work. We didn't just want to plan; we wanted to act. That's why we partnered with Appian. They are helping us build superior tools so that behavioral healthcare providers like us can help children like Jake faster and more effectively. And that's precisely what we've accomplished with Appian's process automation tools. Since we began services in 2021, we've achieved year-over-year growth. This wasn't by working harder—it was by working smarter, by meticulously examining the processes that underpin our clinical services.

Our first major focus was intake—the bottleneck that stifled both our employees and our clients. We centralized our intake data, eliminating duplication and errors, and providing clear visibility for everyone. The anxiety felt by families and staff dissipated, replaced by a clear path forward. Our HIPAA-compliant client intake app was a game-changer; it made it easy for caregivers to know exactly what was next and feel secure in every interaction with us.

The true breakthrough came with the integration of AI. We collaborated with Appian engineers to implement intelligent document processing. Now, diagnosis documents, even handwritten ones, are automatically scanned to extract diagnosis codes, dates, and other crucial information, feeding it directly into our data fabric with human review. We've seen accuracy soar from 80% with manual entry to now approaching 99% with AI. This single change reduced our intake time from six months to less than a week.

Next, we tackled billing. Our previous system required manual data transfer, a process that consumed eight hours per cycle. With Robotic Process Automation (RPA), we slashed that to two hours, with virtually no errors. We are now developing agents to handle the administrative tasks our staff dislike, freeing them to concentrate on what they are passionate about.

And then there's our voice agent. This is not your typical frustrating phone menu. It operates purely on voice commands: listening, responding, and taking action. It's truly remarkable and a testament to the power of agentic AI.

The numbers speak for themselves: patient intake is over 90% faster, decreasing from 180 days to under a week. This isn't merely about efficiency, it's about providing families with hope and progress.

We are far from finished innovating to improve our patients’, families’, and staff’s experience. Our next step is to optimize scheduling, a complex challenge involving therapists, supervisors, families, and even pet allergies. Our new system, designed directly from clinical team requirements, will create the most effective care teams in the field. We’ll be utilizing Appian’s Case Management Studio for intelligent case management, providing a unified view of each client’s entire journey. This will lead to further billing and compliance automation, better insights, and faster revenue cycles.

Most importantly, all of this enables us to deliver superior clinical care. Our teams are enthusiastic about real-time clinical decision-making, improved supervision, and ultimately, a better quality of life for the children we serve. And soon, we plan to extend this solution to other providers in our field, because the impact is too significant not to share.

Appian has been an exceptional partner, empowering us to do more than just grow; it has allowed us to grow ethically, with integrity, and with a profound focus on the people we serve. This is what modern applications should embody: connectedness, intelligence, and process-driven functionality. This is the future of care, and we are just beginning.