Where the Real Work Starts: Reflections from ABA C.A.R.E.S. 2026

EVENT RECAP

By Stephen Donaldson Esq., Chief Revenue Officer at Boost

Some conferences you attend. Others you roll up your sleeves for. The ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, held August 4-7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf, was firmly the second kind, and I came home glad we did.

Billed as the summit dedicated to workforce and operational alignment for ABA providers, ABA C.A.R.E.S. brought together owners, clinical directors, and HR leaders to move past theory and into the practical work of recruitment, retention, and scaling. For a team like ours, built by experienced ABA operators, it was exactly the room I wanted to be in.

The conversations that stayed with me

The best part of an event like this is never the pitch. It's the listening. Over three days, I had provider after provider walk me through where things break down in their practice, and the same pressure points surfaced again and again: intake that starts a claim off on the wrong foot, credentialing bottlenecks that stall new hires, authorizations that slip through the cracks, and scheduling that quietly creates downstream denials.

None of this is new to the teams living it. What struck me was how consistent the pattern is across practices of every size, and how much of it traces back to the same root cause: tools that were never designed to work together. Clean claims don't start at billing. They start at intake, and every step in between either protects that claim or puts it at risk.

Every one of those conversations feeds directly into how we think about the product. Boost was created by people who have run ABA operations, and conferences like this are where we get to pressure-test our thinking against the reality providers face day to day. I always leave with more than I brought.

A note on the panel

I also had the chance to join a terrific panel: “The Hidden Cost of Bad Tech.” Five of us from the software side talked candidly about the questions buyers should be asking vendors, and the honest answers we aren't always presented.

The point I kept coming back to was accountability. If a product can't earn its place, the contract shouldn't do the work the software won't. As I put it on the panel: if my software can't prove itself, I shouldn't force you to stick around just because I needed a three-year agreement.

That's not a knock on long partnerships. It's the opposite. The best relationships are the ones a provider chooses to renew because the tool actually earns it, not because they're trapped by a signature from two years ago. Bad tech doesn't announce itself. It hides in staff burnout, in denied claims, and in the hours pulled away from care every time a team has to fight their own software, and too often we call the result a staffing problem when the real cost was a design decision made in a room the clinicians were never in.

The panel was covered by Acuity Media Network. Read the full piece: ABA Software Buying Guide: Questions Vendors Say Buyers Skip

Grateful, and already looking ahead

A huge thank you to the ABA C.A.R.E.S. team for putting together an event with this much substance, and to everyone who stopped by to share what's working, what isn't, and what they wish someone would finally fix. Those honest conversations are the whole point.

I left Boston energized and a renewed sense of why we do this. This is where the real work starts, and I'm already looking forward to next year.

-Stephen