MissionViewpoint Monthly Update — May 2026
Autism Care Requires Coordination. No System Provides It.
Ask any family navigating autism care what the hardest part is. The waiting list is real. The diagnosis is hard. But once care begins — it's the handoffs.
Information doesn't travel. Systems don't talk. At every boundary — ABA to school, childhood to adulthood, one discipline to the next — someone has to pick up what got dropped.
That someone is almost always the parent.
"The system doesn't support them. It relies on them."
This month: a three-part series on why coordination fails structurally — not just operationally — and what it would actually take to fix it. Plus a profile of SpringHealth Behavioral Health, an operator building a genuine continuum from age 2 to adulthood. And the April SCUBA data.
Let's get into it.
Why Autism Care Coordination Breaks — Systems That Don't Function as One
Autism care already spans multiple systems. The problem is that none of them were designed to operate together.
A pediatrician may diagnose autism inside Epic or Cerner. The intervention that follows happens entirely outside of it. ABA providers manage:
- scheduling
- staffing
- authorizations
- clinical delivery
— inside completely different operational environments. And once care crosses into speech, OT, school, or home, the handoffs become harder still.
The system that diagnoses autism is not the system that delivers it. And the system that delivers it has no meaningful way to coordinate what happens next.
That gap doesn't close as care becomes more complex. It widens.
Read →Who Picks Up the Dropped Baton?
ABA providers have built highly structured operations. Within ABA, this works — because someone actively manages it to work. But autism care doesn't stay within ABA.
Every time care crosses a boundary — ABA to school, childhood to adult services — a handoff happens. Someone has to answer:
- what is being worked on
- what has changed
- who needs to know
Platform choice doesn't remove that problem. Adding service lines doesn't remove it either. The burden just shifts. And today, the person absorbing that burden is usually the parent — not because no one cares, but because no system is designed to do it instead.
Read →What the Coordination Layer Actually Needs to Look Like
Most coordination discussions in autism care immediately jump to integration. That's probably the wrong starting point.
A BCBA reads an ABA session note differently than a pediatrician does. A teacher usually can't act on it at all. The problem isn't moving information between systems. It's making information usable once it arrives.
That changes the requirement. Some providers are already moving in this direction:
- extending workflows across services
- coordinating referrals
- managing scheduling across disciplines
- acting as a lightweight operational hub for the family
Not because their systems are unified.
Because someone decided the handoff itself needed an owner.
Read →SpringHealth Behavioral Health: Bridging Gaps Across Age and Care Models
Most autism care models stop at the edge of pediatric ABA. SpringHealth designed around that boundary intentionally — operating across:
- multiple disciplines
- multiple age groups
- multiple care environments
"These adults are so desperately underserved. We should not be waiting until they get here. Let's get in there earlier."
Twelve states. ~750 employees. Serving individuals from age 2 to — as Tabitha Chapuran puts it — about 87.
What makes that operationally difficult isn't adding services. It's maintaining continuity once care crosses systems, modalities, and age boundaries.
Most organizations avoid that complexity. SpringHealth built around it.
Read the full spotlight →March introduced a slowdown in momentum. April confirmed it. The top tier continues steady, linear expansion. No provider is breaking into a new scale position. Growth is happening — but it is not reshaping the market.
Hiring didn't come back uniformly. It split. Top-tier providers reopened pipelines. Mid-group providers managed or tightened intake.
This cohort continues to outgrow the Top 20 at a significant multiple:
A handful of meaningful moves across the platform ecosystem in April. A few isolated wins, some incremental execution — here's what stood out.
Lumary and Hi Rasmus secured a win with Stepping Stones Group, a large multi-disciplinary provider with a significant ABA footprint.
Autism Testing 4 Kids (AT4K) is expanding virtual diagnostic evaluations nationwide, including direct-to-consumer access and partnerships with ABA providers.
EarliPoint Health partnered with Netsmart to distribute its assessment technology across Netsmart's IDD provider network.
Brellium introduced an "email efficacy" dashboard to track whether provider-facing feedback is actually improving documentation quality.
Hipp Health rolled out integrated clinical treatment planning within its platform, allowing plans, goals, and supporting data to be created and carried through in a single workflow.
Following Thoughtful AI's apparent exit from standalone ABA services RPA/Automation, vendors including Simple Fractal and Silna Health have begun positioning rapid transition and stabilization support for affected providers.
No meaningful presence or announcement activity around the National Autism Data Registry (NADR) at CASP 2026. What started as an ambitious project at Jade Health seems to have been deprioritized by CASP.
Full Platform SCUBA →Closing Thoughts
The coordination problem in autism care won't be solved by a better integration or a more comprehensive platform.
Those help. They don't close the gap.
The gap exists because these systems were built for different purposes, with different models of what care is. They can exchange data. They can't operate on the same model of care.
The coordination that happens today is being carried by families. That doesn't have to be permanent. But fixing it starts with making the handoffs usable — not with connecting more systems.
Until next time,— Scott P.S. I work with ABA providers, platforms, and investors on strategy, operations, and market positioning. If that's relevant to your work, reach me at missionviewpoint.com
When autism services scaled rapidly, platforms scaled with them — and became embedded in ways that are now very hard to undo.
The rigidity that came with that dominance is shaping everything operators are trying to do today.
Next month I'm looking at how that happened, what it's doing to provider operations, and where the path through actually is.
