SIDIS Health News

The US healthcare system is typically made up of physicians, nurses, technicians and administrators that manage an ecosystem that is designed for sporadic visits by many different patients. The focus in this environment is around how many new referrals, consultations and tests for new and existing patients are delivered each year, averaging around 3-6 interactions per patient annually. This infrequent service model is in stark contrast to that of young patients receiving treatment for autism where appointment frequency is high, daily in most cases, and the number of individual specialists is many, being comprised of therapy from Applied Behavior Analysis, Speech, Occupational, Physical, Music and Nutrition. Patients require ongoing services for several years starting with early intervention defined by a diagnosis of autism by age 2 and subsequently starting therapy. Early intervention has been identified as being a key factor in the success rate of the patient achieving age-appropriate development standards and maintaining those goals throughout their adolescent years.

While most of us consider it an occasional hassle to make an appointment to go see our doctor, either for an annual physical or for a specific ailment, it usually ends up being nothing more than a general inconvenience for those infrequent instances. For families with children diagnosed with autism this slight inconvenience is a mere dream as parents and caregivers struggle to find the time and energy to coordinate multiple care providers and locations of therapy nearly every day and for years on end. Caregivers have to manage their health insurance, often requiring specific plans for their child that provide additional coverages and higher limits for frequent appointments and services. Care coordination historically has entirely been left up to the caregiver who has had the burden of locating and scheduling various therapies across their local, and sometimes not so local, geography, needing to make calls to an ABA clinic and inquire about insurance coverage, scheduling an assessment, waiting on prior authorization for services and then dealing with endless waitlists before their child can receive services. Also needed are separate appointments for occupational, physical and speech therapy which can all be separate clinics and sometimes even more for nutritional diagnostics and various other forms of therapy all in the hope to provide their child with the best life possible.

All of these activities and services become overwhelming for caregivers to juggle, making it a full time job just to schedule appointments, transport their children back and forth from home to school to ABA therapy to speech therapy to occupational therapy and back home. And that is just with one child let alone add in one or more other children that must also be cared for during this stressful time. These parents and caregivers need tools and organizations to find and create solutions to make their lives easier since their interactions with the healthcare system are significantly different from most. The autism services industry has over the last five years or so been attempting to simplify the care delivery model and provide multiple services in one clinical setting, reducing some of the complexities for parents geographically. However, while the availability of multiple autism specialties in one clinic has become more common it has not become easier for caregivers to track their child’s progress towards goals, manage scheduling and appointments, monitor costs/payments and track their expectations of treatments. This is the place that technology can make a big difference. So much of the treatment delivered to children is now electronically managed in Electronic Health Records systems (EHRs) and is available to clinics to manage the internal operations processes necessary to efficiently deliver these services. It should, therefore, be simple to provide this information to caregivers using modern mobile device technology and apps, however there are not any effective systems out there today that deliver this.

Sidis Health recognized that there were problems in this area as well as the design and delivery of technology solutions for autism services organizations to manage their internal operations and therapy. We set out to develop a better platform on which advanced companies could transition their operating model to better serve their therapy and business needs while delivering superior service quality to the caregivers who have taken on the challenge of providing care for their loved ones. By designing a platform that integrates all aspects of clinic operations and therapy delivery Sidis Health also provides an advanced mobile application interface for caregivers to manage their child’s health profile, availability for services, insurance information and clinic locations where they prefer to receive services from. This revolutionary Sidis Health portal provides detailed information for caregivers to not only see and manage their appointment schedules but also receive feedback from their child’s providers and easily monitor progress towards the short-term and long-term goals laid out by the treatment plan. Communication between the clinic staff and providers is secure and fast, with a mobile notification system that keeps caregivers up-to-date on what is coming up, simplifying their lives while improving visibility into care quality. Bringing modern, fully integrated technology into the unique world of autism services for the benefit of patients is the mission of Sidis Health and we strive to always be two steps ahead of the curve in delivering the best clinical solutions.