Over her 3-decade career as a licensed psychologist and BCBA-D®, Dr. Ivy Chong has led clinical programs across hospitals, schools, and home settings, seeing firsthand how administrative weight impacts care.
She recently joined Motivity’s Scientific Advisory Board, and we asked her about new clinicians, how leadership can shield teams from audit anxiety, and what "value-based care" means for the future of our field.
What made you want to join Motivity’s Scientific Advisory Board?
Throughout my career, I've been drawn to opportunities where science and practice intersect to improve care. Technology is an increasingly important part of how we deliver high-quality ABA services, but only when it's designed to support clinicians and operators to complete their work more efficiently and provide better insights.
Motivity is committed to grounding its platform in behavioral science while continuing to evolve based on the needs of clinicians and organizations, big and small. This is a great opportunity to contribute my experience as a clinician, academic, and healthcare executive to help ensure technology remains aligned with best practices and ultimately improves outcomes for autistic individuals.
You’ve spent years teaching and mentoring future BCBAs®. What do newer clinicians need most today from their tools and leaders to build sustainable, lifelong careers in ABA?
One of the biggest challenges for newer clinicians is that many enter the field because they are passionate about helping people, only to discover the significant administrative burden of documentation, authorizations, scheduling, and compliance. As a result, newly certified BCBAs may find themselves spending more time navigating administrative requirements than doing the work that drew them to the field: working with clients.
They need leaders who create environments where learning continues post certification, questions are encouraged, and clinical quality is valued. They also need technology that reduces cognitive load rather than adding to it. Good tools should organize information, provide meaningful data, simplify documentation, and protect clinicians time to support teams and work with clients. When unnecessary friction is removed, clinicians have more capacity to build strong client relationships, supervise effectively, and continue growing professionally.
Payor requirements and audits create so much anxiety for clinical teams. How can leadership use technology to shield BCBAs and RBTs from that stress so they can just focus on care?
Documentation and compliance are critical aspects of service delivery, but they should not dominate a clinician’s day.
Leaders are responsible for building systems that make doing the right thing easy, with less clicks or complex workarounds. Technology can support this by embedding documentation requirements into clinical workflows, providing real-time feedback when information is missing, and helping teams identify issues proactively before they become audit findings.
When clinicians trust that their systems support quality documentation, they can spend less time worrying about compliance and more time focusing on treatment decisions, client progress, and family outcomes. This is where their expertise has the greatest impact.
When you think about Motivity’s role in the future of ABA, what stands out to you most?
Increasingly there are discussions about value-based care. The right data, that is easily available, is necessary towards that endeavor. While data collection has always been a hallmark of ABA services, simply collecting information is not sufficient. Motivity’s commitment to creating a robust platform that generates valuable insights at the individual and aggregate level is exciting.
The opportunity is to move beyond documentation as an administrative requirement and toward data that supports better clinical decisions, stronger supervision, improved treatment integrity, and better outcomes. Technology must help clinicians spend less time managing information and more time interpreting it.
What do you hope this advisory board accomplishes for the ABA field?
The most valuable innovations in ABA will be grounded in science, responsive to the everyday realities of service delivery, and focused on improving outcomes for the people we serve.
Collaboration among researchers, clinicians, educators, and technology developers is imperative to evolve and improve service delivery. Including multiple perspectives will create tools that are practical, scientifically sound, and impactful for the field. This in turn will protect clinician time, allowing them to practice at the top of their license. Every hour spent searching for information, duplicating documentation, or worrying about compliance is an hour not spent making clinical decisions, mentoring staff, or partnering with families.