Raven Is Different.

Our Story

The Story of Raven Health from CEO, Richard Wagner

As a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, I got to hear some pretty strange dinner table conversations over the years. What is this hip hop thing? Will Ross and Rachel end up together? Is the Y2K bug going to end the world (lol)?

Among some of the more bizarre topics was how awful healthcare software was. Coming from a family of clinicians, I heard firsthand stories about how new electronic healthcare records (EHRs) were clunky and difficult to use, and how family members would have to occasionally spend their entire weekend at hospital-mandated EHR training. “I spent all those years training so that I can be with my patients,” my father once said, “not to spend eight hours on a Saturday being trained on how to do data entry.”

The Unfortunate Status Quo

Sadly, over twenty years later virtually nothing has changed. EHRs can do wonderful things once clinical data has been collected and digitized, but the data collection process remains among the most frustrating experiences for clinicians today. Somehow EHRs have taken our most valuable resource in healthcare – the clinicians themselves – and forced them to spend more time doing data entry and less time with their patients.

This issue is felt most acutely in behavioral health. In contrast to other parts of healthcare, only a small fraction of behavioral healthcare providers use EHRs today, citing challenges with data entry and the need to be mentally and emotionally present for their clients. This is a particular challenge in ABA therapy, where client sessions can last up to eight hours a day. However, in an environment where the number of data points collected in such a session can number into the hundreds if not thousands, relying on pen and paper data collection methods presents transcription and data loss risks, not to mention hours of redundant documentation.

The Raven Health Way

Seeing this challenge, Raven Health made its mission from Day 1 to be the best ABA therapy clinical data collection platform. We did this by spending hundreds of hours with BCBAs and behavioral technicians over many months, observing how techs and clinicians interacted with both technology and their clients.

What we originally witnessed shocked us: many techs took data by pen and paper and then spent time after a session transcribing it into an EHR. Other techs would pause their session with a client so they could flip through sections of their program binder. Some even would turn on a television to let their client watch cartoons while they tried to remember and document the prompts they used in a task analysis program.

We knew at that point what we needed to build: a seamless, easy to use, and invisible data collection tool that allowed technicians and BCBAs to spend more time with their clients and less on documentation. Moreover, we needed to build a tool that could easily take all of the data collected in a session and give BCBAs the power to analyze program progress, document session notes for insurance purposes, and manage their entire business with scheduling features, an insurance billing tool, and more.

Two years later, we’re proud of what we’ve built. Every day hundreds of ABA techs and BCBAs use Raven to deliver best in class ABA therapy to their clients and families, and all of them tell us how we’ve taken the pain – not to mention countless hours – out of data collection. However, our work is not done. Our mission is to partner with ABA providers to allow them to spend 99% of their time on their clients and 1% on everything else. Each day we get a little close to that goal, and we’re excited to show the ABA industry how in the months and years to come.

Richard Wagner
CEO Raven Health