At a glance
“Every clinic runs and looks different, but Motivity will run your way and look your way.”
Meet Jenny
Jenny Saavedra is a BCBA®, Director of Operations and co-owner at ABA Spectrum Therapy in the Greater Austin area. The clinic works with kids from age two up to about 17 and helps families plan the transition into a day program as those teens move into adulthood.
Jenny runs ABA Spectrum Therapy alongside Michelle Khatwani, and when we say “runs it,” we mean both of them are still very much in the day-to-day. In fact, Jenny doesn't have to be at the clinic every day. She could do her job from home. But the kids are there, and so is she. Her job is to make sure the business stuff never gets in the way of the clinical work. That means she needs visibility across everything: what's been documented, what's been scheduled, what's been billed, what's coming up for renewal. And for a long time, her systems made that nearly impossible.
The challenge: Three systems that didn't talk to each other
For a long stretch, ABA Spectrum ran on a setup that'll sound familiar to a lot of growing practices: session data happened on one platform, scheduling and operations on another, and billing ran through a third system that had no connection to either.
Getting a clear read on the money was the hardest part. Any time Jenny needed to know how much had been billed, what was still waiting on a response, which claims had come back denied and why, she had to pull it out of separate tools and piece it together. The time her team spent just managing claims, she said, was “astronomical.”
“Our previous setup was one clinical and one practice management. Not talking to each other created issues. We did our session notes for patients on the clinical side, but they were not tied over to where we were billing on the practice management side. So there was a lot of administrative work checking back and forth, looking up this, going over to this system, and that created backlogs sometimes.”
The solution: A “beautiful marriage” between clinical and practice management
What ABA Spectrum had been after for a long time was a way for the clinical documentation her team produced every day to connect to the system where she managed scheduling, billing, and compliance, so she could stop reconciling everything by hand.
“I was really looking for something that was all in one, but something that was affordable for my clinic.”
Jenny had previously looked at Calmanac, the practice management platform Motivity would go on to acquire, and liked the compliance features. But it would still be separated from her clinical platform, so it wasn’t the right timing.
When Motivity added practice management to the platform, the two halves she'd been running apart were finally in the same place.
“Motivity practice management and clinical is a beautiful marriage, and it was something we were looking for for a long time.”
The switch happened in January, which, if you know ABA billing, is about the worst time of year to touch billing: many patient deductibles reset, and things can get chaotic. It went over smoothly anyway.
The results: A clear picture of learner progress and the practice’s finances
With Motivity, Jenny now pulls a single report and sees what's billed, what isn't, and which denials are coming in.
“I am more knowledgeable about what is happening with our billing without having to dig, pull reports, ask five different people, send emails.”
Seeing the real numbers: what's charged vs. what's collected
One number the old setup could never put in front of her was the gap between what ABA Spectrum charges and what it can actually expect to collect. Like many practices, the clinic bills its own fee schedule, which sits above the contracted rate it carries with each payer. Their previous software surfaced only one of those rates, so Jenny had to run the comparison by hand every time she needed it. In Motivity, both sit side by side:
“This is what we bill, but this is what is expected, and financially that's huge for our company.”
From weekly billing meetings to monthly checkpoints
Her external billing team felt the difference too. The old systems left them nowhere to flag a claim or leave a note, so every question turned into another email thread. Now when a claim needs attention, Jenny flags it inside Motivity. Her billing team sees the note, responds in the same place, and nobody has to chase an email thread to figure out what happened.
“We used to meet with our billing team weekly. Now we meet once a month. We have communication all the time, but we don't have to meet face to face that often because we have such good communication within the system.”
That's a quarter of the time she used to spend coordinating billing and far less of what Jenny calls “digging.”
Catching utilization drift before it becomes a problem
The billing picture got clearer, and utilization is getting the same treatment. Jenny has been using Motivity's AI authorization coach, and for her, the draw is speed: she can glance at how her BCBAs are tracking on utilization without stopping to get a report, and so can her BCBAs.
“With the AI coach in there, I can quickly glance and see how my BCBAs are doing on utilization. That's the piece I love. It's transparent there. I don't have to pull a report to tell a BCBA, “Here's what you've utilized.” They can do that themselves and they can tell me how they're doing on their utilization, which directly impacts that client progress. And they can see that too.
It matters because utilization isn't just a budgeting number for ABA Spectrum. If the clinic recommended a certain number of hours for a child and isn't fulfilling them, the team needs to know early. Maybe the learner is making progress and the next authorization should be adjusted. Or maybe authorized hours are being used up faster than expected because additional intervention is required.
Seeing those patterns early is what makes the conversation possible before the authorization runs out.
Scheduling, compliance, and credentialing without the manual oversight
Scheduling was the next thing that got simpler. Call-outs are a fact of life at any clinic, and covering them used to mean bouncing between views to cancel one appointment and create another.
“Being able to look at that all-provider schedule and know, okay, Susie's called out. So I take that appointment for Johnny, and I just slide it up here. That saves so much time because I don't have to go to five different views to cancel the appointment, reschedule, and mark why it was canceled.”
ABA Spectrum runs two locations, with some staff traveling between both. Jenny can see at a glance who's allowed to work where and who can or can't take a particular patient.
“When I create an appointment, Motivity tells me: this person is not authorized to work with this patient. Then I can see why and I can fix it.”
Credentialing works the same way.
“Monitoring certification expiration, it's right there on my dashboard. It's beautiful. I can see it right away, and I can follow up with staff members when they're getting close to their expiration.”
The reporting is what ties it together. Cancellation patterns, scheduled versus rendered appointments, utilization rates, upcoming authorization expirations, which session notes are done and which aren't—all of it is a quick pull now. Because clinical and practice management share the same data, she can click straight from an appointment into its session note. The answers she used to dig for across systems are a couple of clicks apart.
“I can answer so many more questions faster than I could before.”
Better information for RBTs, more room for families to grow
Beyond the operational wins, Jenny gets most excited about what the platform does, clinically, for the people using it.
“My RBTs get more information than they were able to in the previous clinical system we used. Their BCBAs are able to provide as much or as little information about the program, about the patient… That really leads RBTs to be better clinicians because they can have more detail about what is expected when they're running programs.”
The difference shows up in the room: a technician opens a session already knowing what the BCBA wants to run and why, instead of working from a thinner picture.
Families get the same room to grow into.
“We can have families run programs, and they can be as complex or as simple as they need to be for that family. Every family is at a different place in their journey and we can meet them there and then help move them forward.”
Room to scale, with the right foundations
ABA Spectrum now also keeps parent notes, and incident reports within Motivity, and the team has started documenting employee meetings, discipline, and supervision there too. When annual reviews come around, the record is already sitting there.
“Just being able to streamline so many things into one system is amazing.”
It helps that when Jenny hits a wall, she gets an answer. She's still finding features she didn't know she wanted, and the questions that come with that don't pile up in a ticket queue.
“Any question I have, they're answering. And I have a lot, because I continue to learn and find new tricks with Motivity and new features, and I just want to use them all.”
With a third location opening soon, ABA Spectrum is scaling the kind of complexity that used to make their three-system setup buckle. Now the operational backbone grows with the clinic.
When asked what she'd tell another ABA organization weighing the move, Jenny said:
“Motivity will save you time. It'll save you administrative burden. Every clinic runs and looks different, but Motivity will run your way and look your way.”
If your clinical platform and your billing live in separate systems that don't talk to each other, and you're tired of digging for answers that should be a click away, let’s talk. From the first call, you'll have a clinical expert who understands ABA.