Autism Care Partners named Ivy Chong Chief Clinical Officer and Kris Gochenour Chief Financial Officer as Northeast ABA payment tightens.
Key Takeaways
- Two C-suite seats, filled in one announcement: Autism Care Partners said on July 27 that Dr. Ivy Chong will serve as Chief Clinical Officer and Kris Gochenour as Chief Financial Officer, a pairing the company described as fully filling its executive suite. Chong arrives from Little Leaves Behavioral Services and Gochenour from Verbal Beginnings, two privately held ABA providers that each changed shape this year.
- The Northeast payment map is the operating context: ACP operates across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York. New York cut its technician rate 25 percent in April, MassHealth has proposed holding its schedule flat through 2026, and Vermont barred concurrent billing on January 1.
- Chong’s stated priority is variability, not expansion: She told Acuity the opportunity at a multi-region organization is to improve efficiency and reduce variability, language that tracks closely with what she argued in a May interview about standardization preceding automation. Her clinical remit now spans two of the lower-paying Medicaid ABA markets in the country.
- Gochenour arrives with an accreditor’s background at a useful moment: Before his ABA years he served as Chief Financial Officer of the Community Health Accreditation Partner, the first accrediting body for home and community-based care in the country, though its scope covers home health and hospice rather than ABA. Massachusetts requires center-based ABA providers to hold accreditation by January 1, roughly five months into his tenure.
Autism Care Partners announced on July 27 that it had filled two seats in its executive suite at once, naming Dr. Ivy Chong its Chief Clinical Officer and Kris Gochenour its Chief Financial Officer, a step the company said fully filled its leadership team. Announcements of this kind are usually read as housekeeping, the sort of item that circulates on a Monday morning and is forgotten by Wednesday. What makes this one worth a second look is the map. ACP delivers ABA, diagnostic, speech, occupational, and feeding therapy across five states in New England and New York, and in the past twelve months three of those five have changed the terms on which they pay for applied behavior analysis.
The changes are not uniform, but they run in one direction. New York completed a 25 percent reduction to its technician code on April 1, bringing CPT 97153 to $14.45 per 15-minute unit, the second of two 12.5 percent tranches authorized in the state budget. Massachusetts filed a proposed regulation in May that would re-adopt its ABA fee schedule unchanged on December 1, holding 97153 at $16.37 and leaving the numbers where October 2024 left them. Vermont barred providers from billing 97153 and 97155 concurrently as of January 1, a change the Department of Vermont Health Access has defended as a hedge against federal audit exposure. New Hampshire, at $17.79 for technician-delivered treatment, pays more per unit than either Massachusetts or New York, and it is the counterexample in the group. Its Medicaid program proposed dropping coverage of 97155 entirely in June 2025, then formally retracted the proposal that August after objections from the ABA Coding Coalition. Rhode Island, which routes much of its ABA through a home-based therapeutic services structure, has not made a comparable move.
That is the arithmetic Gochenour inherits. It is also, less obviously, the arithmetic Chong inherits, because in a fee-for-service model the supervision ratio, the session length, and the staffing mix are clinical choices and revenue choices at the same time. The two appointments were announced together, and the executives themselves described the work in terms that overlap more than the job titles suggest.
Ivy Chong Joins Autism Care Partners From Little Leaves After the LEARN Behavioral Deal
Chong is a Licensed Psychologist and a doctoral-level Board Certified Behavior Analyst with thirty years in autism and developmental disability services. She holds a doctorate in behavior analysis from Western Michigan University and an MBA in healthcare management from the Florida Institute of Technology, where she also spent nine years as Director of Autism Services and Training at the Scott Center for Autism Treatment and as an Associate Professor. She served as Senior Vice President of Children’s Services at the May Institute from 2017 to 2023, holds academic appointments at Brock University and the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and has worked with the Behavior Analyst Certification Board as a Subject Matter Expert since 2005. She sits on its board of directors as Treasurer.
She joined Little Leaves Behavioral Services as its first Chief Clinical Officer in May 2023, running a preschool-style early-intervention model for children ages one to six across 18 centers in Maryland, Virginia, and Florida. That work changed hands this spring, when LEARN Behavioral acquired Little Leaves from FullBloom on May 11, moving the division from one private equity-backed parent to another. Her move to ACP comes about eleven weeks later.
“I’m excited to join a highly engaged, mission-driven team,” Chong told Acuity. “ACP’s integrated interdisciplinary care model is a true differentiator from other organizations.”
Asked what she sees in front of her, she went to a theme she has been pressing publicly for at least a year. “Like any other multi-region, multi-site organization, there are opportunities to improve efficiency and minimize variability, and I’m excited to be part of that,” she said. The phrasing is nearly a restatement of what she told Acuity in May, when she closed a long interview on outcomes measurement by arguing that organizations need to minimize internal variability in utilization, supervision, and quality of supervision before the comparisons they and their payers make can mean anything. She has been consistent that standardization is the precondition for automation, not the reward for it.
Kris Gochenour Brings an Accreditor’s Finance Background to a Northeast Medicaid Map
Gochenour is a Certified Public Accountant and a Fellow of the Healthcare Financial Management Association, with an MBA in finance from Saint Joseph’s University and an accounting degree from Temple. He has spent more than seventeen years in healthcare finance across applied behavior analysis, behavioral health, home health, physical rehabilitation, and post-acute care, which is a wider spread of reimbursement environments than most ABA finance chiefs have worked in.
He arrives from Verbal Beginnings, where he served as Chief Financial Officer. The company was co-founded in 2011 by Nick Chappell and Diana Wolf, both BCBAs, and operates seven centers across Maryland and Virginia with roughly 900 employees, one of the few ABA organizations of that size still privately held and one of the only ones carrying both BHCOE and ACQ accreditation. It is also, at the moment, the site of an unresolved labor dispute: Acuity reported this month on a strike at the company’s Rockville center by members of a 33-person bargaining unit. The central argument in that standoff is a version of the one facing every operator in the sector, since wage increases and guaranteed hours draw from the same fixed pool of reimbursement revenue and neither moves without the other giving way.
“What drew me to Autism Care Partners was simple: a mission I believe in, a leadership team with deep, proven experience delivering care at this level, and a care model that actually works, bringing ABA, speech, OT, and diagnostics together under one roof for families,” Gochenour told Acuity.
On the immediate work, he was specific about sequence. “My focus right now is strengthening our financial strategy and infrastructure to power ACP’s continued growth and expand access to care for more families across the Northeast,” he said. He also framed the two appointments as a pairing rather than a coincidence: “I’m especially looking forward to teaming up with Dr. Ivy Chong as she joins as Chief Clinical Officer, building strong clinical and financial foundations together so we can grow the right way.”
What ACP’s Five-State Footprint Looks Like Under 2026 Medicaid ABA Policy
ACP was founded in 1992 as an early intervention provider in New York City and spent the first half of this decade assembling a regional platform. In July 2021 it acquired Autism Bridges, a founder-led New Hampshire provider, and the following month added Puddingstone Place and its three eastern Massachusetts centers. Both deals were backed by Coppermine Capital, the Concord, Massachusetts private investment firm founded in 2002 that still owns the company. By March 2022 ACP described itself as operating eighteen locations across seven states. A job posting the company published this spring for the Chief Financial Officer role described the platform as 25 centers across five. The center count went up; the state count came down.
That consolidation looks different depending on which state you stand in. Massachusetts pays $16.37 per unit for technician-delivered treatment and $30.73 for analyst-delivered treatment, which puts it at the top of the Northeast for analyst-delivered treatment and in the upper middle for technician time. It has also been the most aggressive of the five on enforcement: MassHealth’s retrospective audit of 2024 claims produced recoupment letters demanding repayment from providers whose billed analyst supervision fell below a ratio the state had never codified as a payment condition, a dispute that has since escalated toward litigation. New York sits at the other end. It has cut its way to one of the lowest combined averages in the country, and a joint survey by the state behavior analysis association and the Council of Autism Service Providers found that 74 percent of responding Medicaid ABA providers said they would leave the program if the second reduction took effect. It took effect.
There is a nearer deadline than any of the rate questions, and it happens to sit squarely inside the new Chief Financial Officer’s background. The MassHealth vendor contract requires ABA providers to obtain accreditation from a nationally recognized body, with January 1, 2027 as the cutoff for center-based providers and January 1, 2028 for everyone else. Before Verbal Beginnings, Gochenour was Chief Financial Officer of the Community Health Accreditation Partner, which was created in 1965 as the first accrediting body for home and community-based care and now accredits more than 9,000 agencies as a CMS-approved organization. Its scope is home health, hospice, and home care rather than ABA, so the experience does not transfer directly. It is still an unusual line on a provider CFO’s résumé and a well-timed one. ACP is center-based, its Massachusetts presence is substantial, and accreditation is about to become a capital and compliance question on his desk and a documentation and supervision question on Chong’s at the same moment. Providers have argued to the state that direct review of supervision and treatment quality would be a fairer measure of quality than a billing ratio. ACP now has an executive who has run the finances of the review side.
The appointments land in a year of steady churn at the top of the industry. Acuity’s running list of second-quarter executive moves recorded new Chief Clinical Officers at ANNA Autism Care and Behavior Frontiers, a new Chief Executive at Spectrum of Hope, a leadership change at CalABA, and a string of departures from organizations that had recently wound down or been sold. Providers under margin pressure tend to reach for operators, and both of ACP’s hires fit that description more than the growth-story archetype of a few years ago. Chong talks about variability. Gochenour talks about infrastructure. Neither of them led with expansion. Chief Executive Jim Spink said in the announcement that “the future of ACP looks even brighter” with the two of them in place.
The near-term markers are already on the calendar. MassHealth’s re-adopted fee schedule takes effect December 1. The accreditation deadline for center-based providers follows thirty-one days later. New York’s legislature will take up the next round of proposed ABA reductions in its own time. For a company with centers in five states, the questions Chong and Gochenour have each described in their own vocabulary, how to reduce variation and how to build infrastructure ahead of growth, will be answered against those dates rather than in the abstract.
