At a glance
Supporting adults With IDD, around the clock
Incompass Human Services is a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that supports adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD)—in day programs, in the community, and in 20+ residential group homes. The work runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Staff collaborate across shifts and settings to support more than 600 individuals across its programs, including day services, community programs, and residential group homes.
Overseeing all of it is a large team of direct support professionals (DSPs), clinicians, and managers. The organization is licensed and funded by MassHealth and the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services (DDS), which in 2020 introduced a Positive Behavior Supports (PBS) initiative mandating more consistent, person-centered behavioral documentation, data-informed decision making, and organization-wide oversight of behavior support practices.
In response to this initiative, Incompass hired Brandon Richard as Clinical Director to strengthen clinical quality across the organization in alignment with the Positive Behavior Supports approach.
A high-stakes mandate for a single BCBA®
Brandon came to Incompass with the goal to elevate clinical quality and outcomes across the organization through a PBS approach. Data collection was his first major initiative.
By his first week, he realized that a digital system was the only scalable way to make it work across programs, shifts, and teams—and that choosing the right platform would be critical.
The challenge: A data problem at scale
Incompass already had an EMR system, and the organization had tried to use it for data collection. But Brandon quickly recognized the problem: Clinical data collection was being forced into a system that had not been built for it.
Without a purpose-built solution, clinical decision-making was flying blind. There was no efficient way to review progress across the organization, no graphs to consult, and no real-time visibility into what staff were collecting day to day.
“I didn't have an efficient way to look at the data, especially for all 300 individuals that were on my caseload.”
The challenge was not just technical. Many of Incompass's DSPs had never used clinical software before, and they needed something more flexible than a traditional data collection platform. The organization required a system that could support the realities of adult services: care delivered across multiple environments and teams, staff with varying levels of clinical and technical experience, and nontraditional goal structures centered on quality of life and independence.
The search for the right platform to support Incompass
Brandon had used multiple data collection systems over his 15-year career in ABA, and he understood both the strengths and limitations of the platforms on the market. But Incompass was different from anywhere he'd worked before, and he wasn't willing to force-fit a platform that wouldn’t meet their operational realities.
“Across the last 15 years I've used many different systems that are out there. I knew a lot of the positives and negatives of a lot of them. I did my due diligence. We brought on a few different demonstrations. I talked to a few different companies.”
Before speaking with vendors, Brandon spent hours researching platforms on his own. And when conversations did begin, he was evaluating far more than feature lists. He paid attention to how companies responded, if they understood the challenges he was describing, and whether the people behind the product had any meaningful grounding in the clinical work itself.
What made the difference: Being seen, not just sold to
Adult services is an underserved corner of the ABA world. Most platforms are built around insurance-funded pediatric therapy, and it shows in the assumptions around session note templates, progress report structures, onboarding workflows, and data collection interfaces. Brandon wasn't looking for a vendor to retrofit a tool to fit Incompass’s needs. He was looking for a partner willing to engage seriously with the realities of adult services.
Motivity's team did exactly that. Early conversations moved quickly from sales to substance. BCBAs® from Motivity joined the calls and stayed in the details, asking questions about Incompass's service model, digging into how goals were written, and treating adult services as a meaningful clinical context rather than an edge case.
“I'm not just another client. I am representing a space that is under-supported, underfunded.”
“What I saw from Motivity early on was the genuine investment and interest in time from the BCBAs in delving into this adult services realm with me.”
That dedication carried through into implementation. Incompass's DSP team doesn't include registered behavior technicians—many came to the platform with no prior experience with ABA data collection, and some speak English as a second language. Motivity responded by adapting the training experience to fit them.
“Motivity’s team made a different version of the initial direct support staff onboarding training. There was a lot of bloat in the standard one that my team just didn't need to know and would have just confused them further. They were really able to walk back out of a lot of that additional stuff to both make the training shorter but also make it a lot less confusing for my direct support professionals.”
Motivity’s Program Builder also gave Incompass the flexibility to simplify the data collection experience down to its essentials: a clear label, a straightforward prompt, a simple yes/no response. In a setting where adoption could have easily stalled, that flexibility made broad staff participation possible.
The results: Real-time data across 300 individuals
Getting Motivity live at Incompass required significant behind-the-scenes work. Brandon spent months alongside his colleagues refining goals, defining measurable outcomes, and building a system that could support data collection at scale. Alongside a dedicated BCBA® from Motivity, he built out goal templates in the platform, refining the data collection interface to ensure it was both easy for staff to use and capable of producing meaningful clinical graphs.
Eventually, he knew it was time to launch—to learn, iterate, and improve the system in real time.
What happened next transformed how Incompass understood its own clinical data.
Responsible for oversight across 20+ group homes and multiple programs, Brandon finally had a way to stay connected to the clinical picture without physically chasing down paper data from site to site.
“I can't be everywhere at once. But I can feel closer to that when I can click around Motivity and see those graphs and the data that's being entered moment to moment.
From my desk, I can look at data for all 300 people, whoever I want to click on. I don’t have to go to the residential house, pick up the data, and put it into Excel. It was really transformative.”
When Brandon presented on the success of Motivity's rollout to the Incompass executive leadership team, he counted 2,822 individual programs being tracked across the system.
The external recognition followed. In a meeting with a behavioral health clinician from the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services—the state agency that funds and oversees Incompass's work—the recognition was direct:
“We have the best data collection of any organization she has ever supported.”
For a BCBA® that had once been told this effort was nearly impossible, it marked a very different outcome. The success of Motivity at Incompass now allows the organization to efficiently and effectively highlight their amazing work and, most importantly, the achievement of the individuals they serve.
If your organization is navigating a similar transition, or trying to make clinical data work in an environment most ABA platforms were never designed to support, we'd like to hear about it, and so would Brandon!
FUN FACT:
Incompass' team has a Motivity jingle that goes like this:
"I like the way you work it - MOTIVITY - with data to back it up!"