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“We use Shakudo to shorten development time and time to impact. The platform provides us with a value-added shortcut to get from Point A to Point Z much faster. It’s now weeks or months vs months and years. And the faster we can roll out these solutions, the more impact we can have on the market, and the more impact our customers can have on the community they serve.”
Chris Sullens
CEO at CentralReach
Background
Founded in 2012, CentralReach is the leader of Autism and IDD Care software and services for applied behavior analysis (ABA), multidisciplinary, and special education designed to help children and adults diagnosed with autism and related intellectual and developmental disabilities - and those who serve them - unlock potential, achieve better outcomes, and live more independent lives. CentralReach is the only end-to-end solution in the market that integrates all aspects of autism and IDD care.
The Challenge
Since GenAI was introduced in 2022, CentralReach has dedicated itself to finding opportunities to apply AI to solve many of its customers' problems, such as managing growth and improving clinical outcomes for the community it serves.
Chris Sullens, CEO of CentralReach, discusses the severe capacity constraints facing the industry. The number of impacted individuals is growing by 9-10% annually, yet only half the required clinicians are available to treat them. He says the company was looking to use AI to alleviate some of these capacity restraints, minimize the negative impact of high turnover rates, and connect the dots between assessment, protocols, curriculum, and data output to enhance long-term outcomes. Ultimately, they expected this strategy to lead to increased margins, revenue, and cash flow for their customers.
For CentralReach, clinical documentation that is always payor compliant was a perfect use case for AI. Every payor has their own rules, some as particular as a clinical note must be 3 sentences, and even the best clinician out there would have a hard time remembering all the necessary requirements to ensure the clinical note is compliant. That's where AI comes in: generating a payor-compliant clinical note based on data collected during a session for a clinician to review, all of which reduces the administrative burden on the clinician and helps them maximize their time on clinical care. CentralReach realized that they were ready for the next step in accelerating their AI journey.
The Solution
In their quest for a solution, CentralReach evaluated numerous vendors. Due to their familiarity and progress with AI, the company felt that they were already further advanced than what some vendors were offering out of the box as part of their solution. Unfortunately, none of the vendors or platforms they evaluated offered a solution to their exact problem.
Until they found Shakudo.
David Stevens, Head of AI at CentralReach, explained the challenge.
“We wanted to ramp up our prototypes. We started looking at some of the big companies, like AWS, and while they're amazing, they lag behind the point solutions that are best of breed, really leading edge. And so, it quickly became apparent that if we went down that legacy path, we were going to be hamstrung in terms of our ability to quickly deliver POCs. We started searching for platforms, and that's when we found Shakudo.”
David Stevens
Head of AI at CentralReach
Shakudo is a commercial solution that integrates the best data and AI products into customers’ infrastructure and operates them automatically, achieving a more reliable, performant, and cost-effective data stack. The OS supports a broad range of data stacks across various infrastructures, allowing data scientists to develop, run, and deploy their data pipelines and applications in an all-in-one integrated environment.
The Implementation
One of the advantages of a data and AI OS is the ability to jump in. Users can explore an idea in Shakudo and validate whether it is a working solution that could be tested out quickly and know how directionally accurate they were. Without Shakudo, teams would have to wait for the traditional DevOps route, making sure everything complied with all the SOC2 requirements before moving forward. With Shakudo’s contained environment, users can spin up new things and throw out the things that don’t work without wasting weeks of time and company resources.
Dave expands on this point.
“CentralReach has an amazing team with deep expertise. Shakudo allows us to get these subject matter experts closer to the delivery, closer to the solutioning domain. Creating solutions themselves where they used to not have this capability. They had to write requirements and send them off to an engineering team. Today, we can leverage a range of open-source tools, replace them if they're not working for us, and easily try something else – sometimes even twice a day. It helps us save weeks or months.”
David Stevens
Head of AI at CentralReach
Shakudo integrated with CentralReach’s existing tools and helped them create a robust end-to-end data stack. This partnership enabled CentralReach to quickly and smoothly integrate LLM features and machine learning algorithms into its existing workflows, without engineering resources.
Chris reflects on the partnership:
“Shakudo allows us to accelerate our transparency, visibility, and time to market. I’ve also really appreciated having the Shakudo team, engineers, and support people semi-embedded on our team and shoulder-to-shoulder with Dave and his team. This has been hugely helpful to allow us to make the most of the tool.”
Chris Sullens
CEO at CentralReach
The Results
Since deploying Shakudo, CentralReach has been leading the way with its AI solutions designed to boost professionals working in the autism and IDD care industry. Recently, the company introduced CR NoteGuardAI, the industry's only fully-integrated, proprietary AI-powered note copilot designed to generate, audit, and fix clinical note summaries.
CentralReach also launched CR MobileAI which provides AI-generated session summaries that clinicians can review, edit, and approve before submitting. In a recent study, CR MobileAI showed a direct impact on billing velocity, producing significant improvements in as little as 24 hours, with on-time conversions increasing to 99%.
In a mission-driven company like CentralReach, at the end of the day, every problem they solve helps someone out there live a better life. What better use for AI than that?
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