Timothy Zercher 0:00

Well, Jamie, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Hey, Tim. Great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show today. Absolutely. So you've spent over 25 years working in autism care and behavioral health. What first drew you into the field?

SPEAKER_01 0:13

I was a young psychology student, idealistic psychology student at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and thought before I went out into the work world, I should probably get some experience. And there was an advertisement in the psychology library to work with a child with autism. And at the time, I had done some work as a summer camp counselor and thought it sounds like a great opportunity. I really didn't know what autism was. I think at the time, the the only reference point that maybe I had was the movie Rain Man with Dustin Hoffman, which kind of brought autism more into the public eye. And I thought, how hard could this be? It sounds like an interesting opportunity. Well, it ended up being a lot more challenging than I thought it was going to be, but also a lot more rewarding. The little boy that I worked with for about three years went from presenting with kind of classic autism symptoms to three years later after very intensive behavioral therapy with a team of college students like me, overseen by a behavior analyst. That little boy was able to integrate into a first grade classroom without any kind of special education supports. And I keep in touch with him today. And he comes, has dinner with my family, and has become a good friend and definitely is my inspiration every day.

Timothy Zercher 1:28

That's really cool. That's really cool. And that was what, 25 years ago. So now he's almost 25, 30, right? Yeah, he's in his 30s now. So cool. That's cool. That's really cool. It is awesome to be able to see like kind of the full life and the impact you had, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Yeah, absolutely.

Timothy Zercher 1:44

So early point is bringing eye tracking technology into autism diagnosis, and I suppose treatment as well, like diagnosis and treatment both. What do you think this technology could change for providers and families?

SPEAKER_01 1:59

Yeah, well, this technology, the research behind it started just about the same time as I was starting in the field over 20 years ago now. And the scientists noticed that children with autism were looking at different things than typically developing children. Well, whereas a typically developing child, when maybe mom points to something, the child follows the point and looks back to mom. We call that joint attention and child development. A child with autism may be focused on a picture on the wall or the fan hanging from the ceiling or a toy on the floor. And so they used that insight to ask the question what if we could see the world through the eyes of the child and began experimenting with eye tracking technology to look at the differences in how children with autism viewed the world versus typically developing children. Fast forward 20 years later, almost $60 million in NIH funding to support this research, hundreds of publications, and including two seminal studies that were published in the journal of the American Medical Association early point today, uses data science and the collection of eye tracking data to not only provide a diagnostic result, which can with 90% probability separate children with autism from those without autism, but it also generates a developmental profile looking at the severity of their autism across social disability, language comprehension, and nonverbal learning, some of the core symptoms of the disorder. And why that's so important is two things. You hear about autism being a spectrum disorder, right? That no two children quite look the same. So this provides a really objective developmental profile of the child as a starting point. Then, more importantly, that profile can be changed over time. And whether that's through behavioral therapies or other types of treatment models, we can actually detect change in those symptoms over time with Early Point, which brings a tremendous amount of insight into the care journey for families, for the providers that are working with the child, for the payers that are funding those services. So really being able to bring an objective view into the health care of children with autism and looking at the impact of treatment, I think is probably one of the most revolutionary aspects of the technology.

Timothy Zercher 4:31

Absolutely. I can see how that would impact almost every single side of autism care right now. So you've led multiple teams across clinical care education and now much more so healthcare technology. What do you think is one of the biggest mistakes organizations make when trying to grow to scale without sacrificing that quality and focus to care?

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Yeah, I think a couple things. People hiring too quickly, especially when you're an entrepreneur and you raise money, you raise capital, and immediately instinct is how do we scale up quickly? And I often see that people make hiring mistakes early on and really finding the right people with mission alignment, real world experience, and folks that you can work well with and that can work well within your team culture, I think is so important. And sometimes when people rush those hiring decisions, they end up spending a lot of time trying to fix those issues rather than being able to grow the business. The second is understanding when it's time to accelerate in certain areas. So whether that's product development, whether that's your sales team, whether that's your customer support function, it's easy to just say, let's develop product endlessly, or let's just keep throwing in more salespeople to hit a revenue target. But understanding the KPIs of the organization and what are the signals that tell you now it's time to accelerate in this area of the business, I think is another thing that sometimes people miss.

Timothy Zercher 6:05

Absolutely. What have you found is one of the hardest roles or positions to fill as you're growing those teams, those organizations? Oh gosh.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

Well, I think key leadership roles are so critical because having the right leaders in the right seats is incredibly valuable as then you go to scale the team. I would say probably like most entrepreneurs, the hardest roles to fill are those that are driving the growth of the business. So you go to market team, sales, marketing, really finding the right balance of people that have done the job before, but had that industry-specific experience. And it's not just about hiring somebody that's got a Rolodex of people to call. It's really about can they engage in a consultative process with your partners, your prospective partners? Can they bring insights into that process from their own experience? That goes a long way, especially when you're working in healthcare and behavioral health.

Timothy Zercher 7:04

Absolutely. Well, and even if they had the experience, are they flexible enough to do new things too? I think that's always a challenge, too.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Well, that's true. I mean, so there's different schools of thought there. Sometimes people say it's great to bring in somebody who's been in the big company to work in the small company if you're trying to become a big company. Other skills of thought say if you're a big company and you want to drive innovation, bring in somebody that's worked in a small entrepreneurial endeavor that kind of understands and has that entrepreneurial innovative spirit. And I've seen sometimes those become big culture mismatches. You bring in the guy that's worked in the big company and suddenly you're in a smaller company where you don't have the same amount of resources. You often have to wear multiple hats. You have to be very flexible, as you mentioned. That can be a mismatch. And I'm sure the other way around, too. People going into a large company who have worked primarily in startups or early stage ventures can sometimes be overwhelmed or stymied by process and policies that exist in a larger organization.

Timothy Zercher 8:06

Yeah. At different points in my career, I've at least one of those, if not both of those. And I know I broke some furniture on my way because I'm like, well, if you just got to figure it out. And it's like, well, yeah, no, that's how you operate at much smaller levels. You don't just do whatever you want here. Since we are a marketing advertising agency for behavioral health, we always have to ask some marketing type questions. The first one for you is what works best right now when it comes to gaining new partners, especially outside of Word of Math? Because I think that should always be, that should always be a primary source of new business.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Sure. Well, I think something that is specific to my experience here at Early Point is that this is a new type of technology and really a new category that that we're defining in terms of objective biomarkers, outcome measures, diagnostic. And so in my previous role, where we built electronic medical records, revenue cycle management, it's kind of a known category. And so the marketing was really about we knew people were looking to choose a medical record or choose an RCM partner. And how do you differentiate yourself from the sea of other vendors that are offering similar services? And you're highlighting things like your product features or advancements in your technology or even your customer support and how you partner with your customers. This is a little different because nobody's going online and searching eye tracking biomarker for autism. And so, and when you look at even search terms like autism diagnosis, it's primarily families that are going and searching for those types of terms, not the clinicians that we're selling our product to. So we've had to really focus a lot on education, educating the market through we've launched a webinar series that we put on every month with continuing education credits for clinicians that are kind of our target audience. We're out there at a lot of trade shows and conferences and spending time with partners, helping them understand the technology, understanding the research behind it, but also playing a consultative role around how they can integrate the technology into their clinical workflows because it is a new thing. It's not swapping out one thing for another, it's integrating a new technology and a kind of new way of thinking about assessment that they may not have contemplated before.

Timothy Zercher 10:33

Yeah. Yeah. And often that changes multiple steps in their processes, I would have said.

SPEAKER_01 10:39

Absolutely. I mean, when we talk about the diagnostic journey, many times families are waiting anywhere from six to 24 months to get a diagnostic evaluation for autism. And that may be after a year or more of having a pediatrician tell them, let's wait and see what happens before we take that next step. So losing this really valuable time because we know with children with autism, those that get diagnosed before the age of three had significantly better lifelong outcomes. So anything that we could do to accelerate the time from concern to getting answers really impacts the long-term trajectory for that child and for their family. So we notice that a lot of times those wait times, those delays in getting to the evaluation are simply due to bottlenecks in the system. There aren't enough trained clinicians. Most pediatricians don't feel comfortable rendering that diagnosis. So they'll refer in to a developmental behavioral pediatrician, which is a very specialized type of care, or to a psychology group where, again, there's often wait lists, children's hospitals, long wait lists. And so, as an example, one of the things that we do and we've helped our partners do is putting the early point test ahead of the evaluation with the clinician. The test itself can be administered by a trained technician. You don't need the pediatrician or the psychologist present to run the test. Much like if you went for an MRI or an X-ray, there would be a technician that would operate the machinery, and then the results would go to your doctor after. So a big shift that we've helped a lot of our provider partners make is kind of what we call a triage or fast track model where as quickly as they can get that family, there's a concern, bring them in for the test. The full kind of session, including setup calibration, we typically recommend take taking about 30 minutes from start to finish to administer the early point. And then based on those results, that can really inform next steps. For those children who test positive and there's a really clear result, they can move them through the additional steps of the process, interviewing the family, writing up a comprehensive diagnostic evaluation. They can move through that fairly quickly. Versus those children that kind of fall in a borderline category or test negative, we would still advise that those children now move on to receive a full diagnostic evaluation where additional tests are administered. But just having that kind of different care pathways and creating that efficiency has helped clinicians be able to see a lot more kids and move more families through that diagnostic journey. So that's just one example where you're absolutely right. Making those workflow changes isn't as easy as just flipping a switch. You've really got to coordinate and choreograph that whole journey for the family.

Timothy Zercher 13:39

Yeah, yeah. But it makes complete sense. And I imagine it's also a lot less daunting for the families too, when it's, hey, this is a quick test, it takes 30 minutes, it's partly on a computer screen, off we go to the next thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

Absolutely. I mean, one of my colleagues, our chief medical officer, talks about she's been doing this 25 years. She spends hours with a child, and sometimes even at the end of an evaluation to the parent, they filled out some questionnaires, they've answered some questions, what appears to them to be just the doctor playing on the floor with their child. And so when she renders that diagnosis, they say, Well, how do you really know? And one of the things that we see with early point is families really appreciate that there's an objective test, something that's based on data research. It's comparing the data of their child to thousands of other children that are in our scientific model. And to have that objectivity coming from the test, I think is one of the things that's really reassuring for families.

Timothy Zercher 14:37

Yeah, it makes complete sense. Makes complete sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Jim. I appreciate you sharing your experience and I appreciate the the work that you are you're doing for families all over the country.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Great. Well, thanks for having me, Tim. We look forward to expanding the mission of Early Point and hopefully changing the trajectory of care for many more children with autism and their families. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you.