CASE STUDY

CentralReach Extends Their Market Reach with Thought Industries Customer Training Platform

10x

CentralReach Offers Online Continuing Education to Fuel the Board Certified Behavioral Analyst Community

CentralReach is a leading provider of EMR, practice management, and clinical solutions for applied behavior analysis (ABA) clinicians and educators who care for people with autism. Their end-to-end suite of solutions help clinicians and administrators better manage their therapy practices, automate administrative work, deliver client care, develop expertly trained staff, optimize operational processes, and support growth.

CentralReach also provides continuing education and training for the ABA field in an effort to maintain and increase the number of certified behavioral clinicians, technicians, and administrators in the workforce supporting the autism community.

CentralReach sought a customer training platform that was flexible to two primary areas of their business:

  • Onboarding and training their software users.
  • Providing continuing education units (CEUs) for primary care providers or board certified behavior analysts.
  • Their mission is to improve efficiencies for practitioners and grow the workforce dedicated to serving people with autism.

When COVID-19 broke out in the United States and a lot of the technicians and clinicians found themselves out of work, CentralReach opened up their entire CEU library for free to the ABA community for clinicians to continue their training and not run the risk of their Certifications lapsing during the pandemic.

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With only an estimated 38,000 clinicians to provide care to millions of people with autism, the industry already faced a capacity constraint and any additional loss of clinicians in market due to COVID-19 would be devastating to those seeking care. The implications of this really drove our decision to open up our courses for free for a period of time. And, we are thrilled with the feedback we’ve received on the value these courses have provided as well as the user experience of the learning portal. We were glad to do our part to give back to the community in this time of need.”

Karen Parisi, Senior Vice President of Marketing, CentralReach

THE CHALLENGE

CentralReach needed a platform to train their clients within the ABA community and sell continuing education offerings.

THE SOLUTION

Thought Industries offered CentralReach a comprehensive solution to deliver training for both of their use cases without sacrificing usability or design.

The Challenge

CentralReach worked within its own homegrown solution for a while but realized this couldn’t scale as their business continued to grow. When they began their search for a customer training platform, they knew they needed a solution that enabled them to distribute their CentralReach software training and ABA continuing education offerings in a manner that provided a more seamless administrator and user experience for both their customers and learners. They required a customer training platform built for the breadth of their business.

The primary capabilities for a successful re-launch of both initiatives included:

  • Microsites with unique domains
  • Dynamic, customizable gamification
  • Dual access to their software training and CEU offerings
  • Flexible monetization options to sell courses and content
  • Enable Clients to manage and brand their own microsites
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The cost to a practice for a clinician not maintaining their certifications is immense. Thought Industries learning portal is a really important tool for our customers in that it enables them to make sure that everybody’s getting the courses and the training they need to remain compliant, and enabling us to provide the unique training they need regardless of state regulations or rules they must adhere to. Say you didn’t take your yearly CPR course and you’ve lost your license status in your state. You wouldn’t be allowed to bill for any hours. Which means you’re not producing during that time, which can have a pretty dramatic impact on your business.”

David Stevens, Senior Director of the CR Institute

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The ecommerce capabilities and our ability to open up our course catalog to not just our customers, but the entire marketplace, is really where the value is at this moment with our CEU offering. We’ve reached a population that I don’t think would have been easy to do before.”

Karen Parisi, Senior Vice President of Marketing, CentralReach

The Solution

With Thought Industries, CentralReach not only stood up both initiatives but were also able to quickly pivot in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and offer their community a means to continue building their professional portfolio.

Since launching free access to their CEU course, CentralReach has experienced:

  • 23,526 people, of which 18,000 are BCBAs, signed up for the program, or nearly 50% of the clinicians that serve the ABA market
  • Their enrollments into courses have increased more than ten-fold compared to the last year

CentralReach partnered with Thought Industries, the industry leader in B2B customer training, to empower growth within their community and their customer base.

  • Panorama: Multi-tenancy made it easy for CentralReach to offer their customer base a customized learning solution tailored to their different clients’ needs
  • Commerce: Simplified how users access the two learning initiatives from a single login point
  • Learning Paths: Guide learners to a CEU through milestone-based learning where each completion awards credits
  • Gamification: Engagement tools were crucial for CentralReach in marking progress towards certain goals
50
Market Penetration
10x
Enrollments Since 2019
23k+
Registered Learners in 3 Months
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“Our goal with the CentralReach Institute is to serve all of the staff training and continuing education needs of our customers.”

—David Stevens, Senior Director of CR Institute, CentralReach

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