CentralReach’s ReportDraftAI turns six months of ABA data into a review-ready reauthorization draft. Its Chief Product Officer explains what BCBAs still own.
Key Takeaways
- Indirect work takes a large share of BCBA time: A survey in Behavior Analysis in Practice found behavior analysts spend about 46 percent of their time on indirect tasks, against a recommended 25 to 30 percent.
- The software assembles, the clinician decides: ReportDraftAI pulls authorization, clinical, and progress data into a draft built on the provider’s own template, and the BCBA supplies the interpretation and the case for medical necessity.
- Outcome data is not in yet: CentralReach said it has no early figures on denial rates or turnaround for reports produced with the tool and expects to share results as adoption grows.
- Documentation scrutiny is the backdrop: Payers are easing prior authorization for some services while ABA faces tighter Medicaid documentation demands, which puts the review step at the center of any AI-drafted report.
Twice a year, for every child on a caseload, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst sits down to prove that treatment should continue. The reauthorization report asks the clinician to look back across six months of sessions, targets, assessments, and authorized hours, and to assemble all of it into a document a payer will accept. CentralReach estimates the process takes nine to 12 hours per report from start to finish, much of it time no one bills for.
On Tuesday, at CR Unite, its user conference in Boston, the company made ReportDraftAI generally available. The product pulls the data a provider already keeps in CentralReach into a structured first draft, which the clinician then reviews, interprets, and signs. “We knew there had to be a better way,” Peter Boumenot, CentralReach’s Chief Product Officer, told Acuity in an interview ahead of the launch. The conference is the company’s first since it announced that Chief Executive Officer Chris Sullens is stepping down, with Chief Operating Officer Clark Convery named interim CEO.
The Documentation Burden Behind ABA Reauthorization Reports
The problem ReportDraftAI addresses is well documented, if not always well measured. In a survey of 322 behavior analysts and trainees published in Behavior Analysis in Practice, behavior analysts reported spending roughly 46 percent of their time on indirect activities such as report writing, data analysis, and treatment planning, compared with the 25 to 30 percent that practice estimates recommend. Burnout in the field is common as well: in a 2021 study of 826 ABA practitioners, 72 percent reported medium to high levels of it.
Boumenot said CentralReach tries to “start with the why,” and that its customers describe the documentation load as a leading driver of that burnout. The company’s aim, he said, is to let clinicians “operate at the top of their license.”
The timing reflects a split in how payers are handling paperwork. UnitedHealthcare said in May it would eliminate 30 percent of its remaining prior authorizations by the end of 2026, and published roughly 1,700 codes that will no longer require approval starting October 1; physical, occupational, and speech therapy were among the specialties it named, and ABA was not. In Medicaid, the direction has run the other way. Federal auditors have recommended more than $123 million in recoupments across four states, largely over documentation, and CMS’s August toolkit for state ABA programs urges states to tighten treatment plan and progress reporting requirements.
How ReportDraftAI Builds an ABA Reauthorization Report
The work begins before any draft exists. An organization sets up its report templates centrally, Boumenot said, and those templates are distributed to its BCBAs. A clinician selects the learner, the template, and the authorization or reporting period, and ReportDraftAI assembles the relevant information into a draft. “We’re asking clinicians to look back across six months of data to try to pull together a report,” he said. “Service data, session notes, clinical target level and assessment information are all brought together into a single place.”
The practical gain, in his account, is the elimination of hunting and transcription: fewer trips to different parts of the chart, fewer lookups outside CentralReach, and none of “the copy and pasting that happens across a six-month period.” The clinician then moves through the report section by section, following a navigation panel down the left side of the screen. Setup is handled through CentralReach’s standard customer-led training, he said, and the main task for a new customer is building the templates.
“What we’re doing is we’re taking a lot of the administrative burden off of the BCBA,” Boumenot said, “and actually allowing them to focus more on the clinical narrative and the clinical judgment making that goes into that reauthorization report itself.”
Where the BCBA Stays in Control of an AI-Drafted Report
According to the company, the clinician reviews the assembled content, applies clinical interpretation, documents medical necessity, and adds recommendations. Signature functionality for BCBAs, supervisors, and caregivers moves the report toward completion, and the finished document can be published from CentralReach.
The feature Boumenot called his favorite sits in the middle of that process. While drafting, a BCBA can tag a colleague or the organization’s clinical quality director into the report itself “to drive peer revision and oversight,” he said. If a clinician is unsure how best to capture a clinical decision, the reviewer can give direct feedback before the report is finalized or published. In product images CentralReach released with the launch, each draft in the report list carries a count of unresolved comments. Some organizations, he noted, run a centralized clinical quality team for exactly this purpose.
That review step is the part of AI documentation drawing the closest attention in the field. Acuity reported in August that two private equity-backed providers had asked one AI vendor to make assessment reports submittable without a BCBA reading them, a request the vendor declined, and practitioners have debated which AI workflows the ethics code and state law permit. The OIG’s documentation findings (identical notes across clients, narratives too generic to substantiate treatment) describe the risk of a document no one reviewed.
Emily Doak, Chief Compliance Officer at Bloomwell Autism Therapy, which operates clinics in Minnesota, Nebraska, and North Carolina and uses the tool for reauthorization reports, framed the product in those terms in CentralReach’s announcement. ReportDraftAI, she said, “takes on the administrative work without taking away clinical autonomy.”
Payer-Specific ABA Report Templates and a Shared Library
Templates are also CentralReach’s answer to a moving target. “Payers today are constantly updating their documentation requirements,” Boumenot said, on a state-by-state and payer-by-payer basis. Customers control the underlying template directly. “They start with a common form, add and modify sections, and they can do that down to an individual field level,” he said, so that BCBAs are drafting from the most current version.
Looking ahead to 2027, the company plans a CentralReach network-wide library of the most-used templates that customers can add to their own instance. Boumenot described it as “a little bit more of a network effect.” CentralReach says its platform is used by more than 200,000 professionals, and roughly 4,600 provider organizations run operations through it.
What CentralReach Reports From Its Earlier ABA Documentation AI
ReportDraftAI extends two products the company introduced beginning in 2024. NoteGuardAI launched in July 2024 to audit session notes against payer and regulatory requirements before submission. NoteDraftAI drafts session notes for Registered Behavior Technicians to review and finalize.
The company reports that NoteDraftAI has produced more than 5.8 million session note summaries, about 37,000 a day, and that RBTs save an average of eight hours a week on note writing, and that NoteGuardAI now audits about 100,000 notes a day. In August alone, according to CentralReach, NoteGuardAI processed more than 3 million notes across more than 400 organizations and caught failures that put $165 million in revenue at risk. The company has previously described revenue at risk as payments exposed to clawback over minor documentation errors. These figures are CentralReach’s own and have not been independently verified.
For ReportDraftAI itself, the evidence is still to come. CentralReach has not yet seen early data on denial rates for reauthorization reports produced with the tool, Boumenot said, and expects to follow up “as we roll it out across the customer base more broadly.”
He described the three products as a sequence built from field observation. “We spend a ton of time in the field with our customers, listening to their concerns,” he said. NoteGuardAI addressed the auditability of session notes, and NoteDraftAI extended AI-assisted documentation to the RBT on the front line. “ReportDraft for us is really the next evolution of, okay, now how do we help the Board Certified Behavior Analysts become, again, more efficient in their documentation,” he said.
VoiceDraftAI and the Crowded ABA Documentation Market
CentralReach also said its next documentation product, VoiceDraftAI, has moved into beta. It is designed to turn a clinician’s dictation into structured records for incidents, supervision, and intake. Boumenot said the company’s observation of clinicians at work led it there. “There’s still elements of the work where voice is just a better medium for capturing the nuances of, let’s say, initial intake or initial assessment,” he said, adding that the company is looking outside ABA as “we’re seeing more and more adoption of voice in our daily lives as well as in healthcare.”
The category CentralReach is building in has grown crowded on both sides of the claim. Other practice management vendors market their own AI note drafting, Silna Health automates ABA prior authorizations for providers, and payers are adopting their own AI tools, as with Onos Health’s behavioral health platform. A reauthorization report drafted by software may increasingly be read by software as well.
Boumenot returned to the reason he gave at the start. The goal, he said, is to let BCBAs spend more time “doing what they got into the industry to begin with, which is working with clients and helping folks make progress.”
