The context: An NIH-funded field test
Operating across in-home, school, and community settings, Dr. Stacey Shook (Director of Northwest Behavioral Associates) and her team have always prioritized highly individualized therapy and education for children with autism. Because every learner is different, NBA clinicians had unlimited flexibility in how they designed their programs using paper-based methods.
To evaluate how transitioning to digital data collection impacts staff adoption and clinical outcomes, NBA partnered with Motivity for field tests backed by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant funding. The pilot study involved a full clinical team, including Dr. Shook, BCBA® program managers, and behavior technicians, alongside participating families with children with autism ages 2-16, receiving in-home services.
The challenge: The operational cost of clinical freedom
NBA knew that relying on paper was slowing down their clinical decisions. They had evaluated the leading data collection systems on the market but quickly found that none offered the clinical flexibility their nuanced programs required.
Left with a choice between rigid software and manual tracking, they stuck with paper, even though they knew the administrative bottleneck was slowing learner progress.
The solution: Software that adapts to the practice
The goal of the Motivity field test was to see if a digital system could relieve the administrative stress for technicians without forcing BCBAs to compromise their clinical standards.
The transition proved that moving to software didn't have to mean changing their teaching methods. NBA analysts successfully recreated 97% of their existing paper protocols within Motivity. They kept the clinical flexibility they valued, and they built programs 45% faster than their manual process.
For the RBTs® running the sessions, the adoption was just as smooth. The interface was intuitive enough that, after completing a 20-minute self-paced training, technicians were able to navigate the system independently and successfully complete their data collection without additional training or support.
The results: Faster decisions, better progress
Replacing physical binders with automated, real-time graphing shifted the pace of the clinical team.
Because BCBAs no longer had to wait for paper data to be graphed, NBA saw a 340% increase in intervention agility. The team could now identify, in real time, when a program needed adjustment and implement that change.
The Paper vs. Motivity Impact
Data reflect monthly averages during the specific measured timeframe of the study.
That increase in agility directly influenced learner outcomes. Because clinicians could review data continuously and update programs 11 times a month instead of less than one, 80% of learners made more progress with Motivity.
A lasting contribution to the ABA community
Beyond their own practice, NBA’s work during this period left a lasting mark on the wider Motivity community. The protocols and templates they digitized served as foundational inspiration for what would become Motivity's community library. Today, thanks to that early collaboration, Motivity users benefit from a shared library of hundreds of clinical templates.