Behavorial Health Software shouldn't be held together by spreadsheets
Updated: 4 days ago
For most of the past twenty years, the teams I led spent as much time managing software as they did helping clients. Systems of record are so bad at supporting the work to be done that we built spreadsheet trackers in almost every function to fill the gap. Manual status updating, asynchronous decision making, and offline process coordination are the norm in practices of every size in our field. We spend endless hours reacting to problems that bad tools should have avoided in the first place.
Nobody gets into the field to help people because they want to spend their time managing spreadsheets. Your BCBAs and RBTs chose this field to change lives. Administrative and operations people want to do their part to be efficient and effective at supporting families and team members, but most of their time is spent chasing errors and reacting to problems the software should have anticipated and prevented.
I don’t believe we should accept this anymore. The field cannot afford to accept this anymore.
Software providers have been optimizing the wrong thing
For years, ABA practice management systems have operated as databases of record and filtering or reporting tools. Software providers created power by making it difficult for practices to gain easy access to the data they hold. More modules, more fields, and more reports have become more costly and difficult to maintain rather than enabling workflow automation, planning, and insight.
Capturing comprehensive, complex data and enabling configurability became the goal instead of answering the question, “How much work can the software take off my team’s plate?” The cost is not inefficiency. It is people.
When your clinicians spend evenings finishing session notes, you do not just lose hours. You lose people. When new client inquiries get bogged down by gaps and overlaps of effort, or reactive problems dominate your operations team’s day, client and team member experiences suffer. Client growth and team member growth grind down to the lowest performing function. How many times have we heard, “We have to start a waitlist because we can’t hire fast enough to replace our turnover,” or, “We need to stop or slow down hiring because we don’t have daytime client hours”? Teams solve the symptom, not the root cause problem.
Burnout in this field is not a mystery. It is what happens when talented, mission driven professionals spend endless work time scrambling to react to problems the systems should have handled for them.
Downstream, compliance suffers. A denied claim is a symptom. It is a signal that your team caught a problem after the fact instead of preventing it at its source, and that someone now has to spend an afternoon fixing what should never have broken.
Good software should make your best people feel empowered to achieve the mission, not exhausted and constantly feeling like they are failing.
What behavioral health software should actually do
Software for a behavioral health practice should do two things:
It should synchronize the people, processes, and systems of your practice so your team is not the glue holding disconnected tools together.
It should give you real intelligence before small, actionable gaps become big, unsolvable problems. This should be true in every function of the practice, and every function should be proactively managed within the context of all the other functions that work together in a healthy practice.
The technology to do this exists now. Agentic AI can find and schedule the right provider to cover a session the moment someone calls out, instead of leaving a family without care and your coordinators scrambling. It can catch the error that leads to a denial while there is still time to fix it. It can do the clerical work rather than generate more of it. It can deliver insight to people so they can focus on human connections rather than hunting for information and firefighting. This is the standard we should be holding every vendor to, including the one I run.
Where this goes next
I started down this path because I got tired of watching great teams feel like they are failing and doing their worst work on poorly designed tools. The practices that thrive over the next decade will be the ones that refuse to accept the administrative chaos and daily struggle to maintain compliance or even just survive. They will demand software that removes work, protects their people, and gives them back the focus on the human part of human services.
That is the practice I want to help you build. I want to help you enable your people to focus on what only your people can do: changing lives through exceptional care.
Lani Fritts
CEO, Boost
