Building Clinical Excellence in Autism Services: How Apollo Trains and Supports RBTs and BCBAs - Session 322

I couldn't think of a better segue to the main topic of clinical excellence.

This is something and how that relates to client outcomes.

I know that's been something that you guys harp on all the time.

Let's maybe take a step back.

The term clinical excellence sounds like a value or a principle.

to a North Star, if you will, to always be shooting for and not necessarily like a goal that you can achieve or something like that.

At least that's what I think when I hear that sort of thing.

I'm curious, when you guys use that term clinical excellence, Apollo, what specifically are you talking about? And then maybe we can get down to maybe some of the more actionable or tactical things that might be more easily measurable.

But let's just start from the so-called 30,000-foot view of what you mean when you use this term clinical excellence.

Yeah, and I'll start, and maybe Kristen can add anything.

But for us, it's a principle, right? There's no endpoint in clinical excellence.

Fundamentally, it's why we're here, right? The whole reason we have an ABA organization is to engage in clinical excellence, to serve the kids and their families and make sure they achieve their full potential.

In addition to that, it's also a functional team.

It's kind of, really, it's everyone's job at Apollo, but there's also a specific team with specific team members that do that.

And so we have a senior director of clinical excellence, a couple of directors of clinical excellence, and we have training coordinators.

And a lot of what they're doing is making sure that we have phenomenal training, we have phenomenal quality assurance, and we measure what we're doing over time.

And they are, in many ways, kind of the gatekeepers of who we admit into our organization as well.

So we do have recruiters.

We have a lot of people that are trying to get people excited to work at Apollo, but we apply a pretty strong filter to make sure for the BCBAs in particular that we're admitting from outside of our organization that they measure up to our standards.

And so it's kind of, you know, it's kind of this amorphous thing.

It's a team, it's a concept, but ultimately it's everyone's job.

And there's no endpoint.

It's just something we have to do forever.

And, you know, I remember the first conversation I had with Kim.

He asked me point blank, how do you know you're doing a good job? And I think, you know, that was in 2019, I guess, maybe early 2020.