Each week I interview an ABA company for the Featured Provider series and write up what BCBAs should know before applying. This week it’s StarRise ABA, an in-home practice operating in North Carolina and Maryland. I spoke with CEO Fayna Pearlman on August 10.
Fayna came out of mental health and operations. At her previous company, the back office referred to BCBAs as divas, and when she asked a town hall who felt the provider team was part of the team, nobody raised a hand. She took the StarRise job on the condition that she could build the company differently. The details below are what that looks like so far.
The clinical model
StarRise is in-home today and adding community-based sessions. The company is building partnerships with equine therapy programs and play spaces, and hiring BTs who will run sessions at the grocery store, the doctor’s office, and the dentist. Fayna’s position is that skills need to be practiced where families actually use them.
Parent engagement sessions and parent workshops are a formal part of the model. The plan is to cluster families by geography and run six to eight parent workshops a year per cluster, partly to address caregiver burnout, partly so parents of similar kids can meet each other.
Caseloads, roles, and tools
Caseloads are capped at roughly ten clients, occasionally one or two more while a role fills out. Fayna’s reasoning came from her conversations with BCBAs who described caseloads of twenty at other companies. Her assessment was that care quality doesn’t survive that volume.
Roles start part time while the caseload builds, then convert to full time with a benefits package at ten clients. The EMR is Motivity. She evaluated options that were more stable on the admin side and picked the one that runs better for providers. She also said BCBAs who propose projects will get resources to run them.
For team leads reading this, the workload math connects to our pieces on how much non-billable time BCBAs need and non-salary differentiators that attract clinicians.
Hiring status
StarRise is hiring BCBAs in North Carolina and Maryland, and new hires start with active cases rather than waiting on intake.
North Carolina requires half of supervision hours in person, so those roles are hybrid. For in-person supervision states, the longer-term plan is a monthly fly-in week, with the BCBA team working from the same city and hotel five days a month and remote the rest. A clinical director is joining, and BCBA groups on burnout and self-care are planned.
If we can expand parents’ expectations of what their kids are capable of, it leaves room for the kids to shine.
— Fayna Pearlman, CEO, StarRise ABA
At a glance
- Settings: In-home, with community-based sessions coming
- Locations: North Carolina and Maryland
- Hiring status: Hiring BCBAs in both states now
- Notable perk: Caseloads capped around ten
StarRise’s site and openings are at starriseaba.com.
Run an ABA company you think BCBAs should know about? Reply to any Book Club email. I feature a new provider every week.
This is not a paid placement. Matt personally interviewed this company and receives no compensation for featuring them.