As a new ABA clinic, choosing your first ABA software is a tough decision.
There’s no billing history to forecast from, no caseload to size against, and no spare admin capacity to cover a bad fit.
Flat-rate pricing takes the same fee whether you’re billing four Learners or forty. Scheduling in one software and data collection in another increases admin work. And switching to a new provider in a couple of years is hard on you and your staff.
Dafne Perez-Quinn, Clinical Director of OwlLight Therapy, made that very decision before her clinic had a single Learner on the schedule. Four years later, OwlLight Therapy is still using Portia as their ABA software.
Here’s her story and how she made the call that led to a growing clinic today.
How OwlLight Therapy Started
OwlLight Therapy opened in 2022 in North Riverside, Illinois, just outside Chicago.
It was co-founded by two BCBAs licensed in Illinois: Dafne and Elizabeth Garcia, who is also the clinic’s CEO. They started by offering ABA therapy through in-home and clinic-based sessions, serving children up to age 12.
Within a couple of years, they narrowed both. “We decided it would be more convenient for the families and for our staff to remain in clinic only,” Dafne says.
The age range followed, driven by the space and the supplies they had. “We just didn’t find it appropriate for us to have like a 3-year-old and a 12-year-old in the same space,” she says. “We found what our limits were and we knew what we could excel with given our strengths.”
Today, the OwlLight Therapy team serves about 24 Learners between the ages of 1 and 5, with a large share of them funded through Medicaid, in clinic-based sessions only.
Why Picking The Right ABA Software With No Caseload Still Mattered
For a clinic that hadn’t opened yet, picking the right data collection system wasn’t item #9 on OwlLight’s launch list.
It was item #1.
The decision might sound premature until you look at what sits downstream of it:
- Staff have to be trained on the system before they can run a session.
- Programs and goals have to be built before they’re assigned.
- Every clinical record the practice produces starts accumulating inside whichever platform gets picked first.
Choosing late doesn’t defer the decision; it just means making it while you’re also delivering therapy.
So she made it early, from a parking spot, calling her business partners to tell them she thought they had their data collection system. She called it step one, and for a practice that runs on data collection, making that decision first was critical.
The Deciding Factors
Here’s what drove the decision that led the OwlLight Therapy team to choose Portia.
All-In-One Platform
Dafne wanted scheduling and data collection in one place rather than two.
When starting out, only a few people are doing all the jobs at a clinic, and separate systems multiply that work before there’s anyone spare to absorb it.
She puts the math plainly about the risk of going with two separate tools: “Now it’s 2 jobs instead of one.”
Billing Model
Insurance revenue changes constantly, but a clinic with no history has nothing to forecast from, so a flat monthly fee asks an owner to commit to an amount they can’t yet see.
“Having a flat rate was kind of scary for us, because we had just started,” she says.
Portia’s pricing offers a flat rate per client, with different insurance billing models whether you’re just starting or have multiple locations.
Customer Service
This was the one she ranked highest, but what tipped it wasn’t a feature.
The Portia team set up a test client, so Dafne and Elizabeth could build programs and try scheduling before they had anyone to schedule. The team lead walked them through packages, checked in, and was also the person on the call when she signed.
She can still pull up her first email to Portia, sent from a Gmail account before OwlLight even had a company address, and she’s worked with the same Portia billing partners since the beginning in 2022.
BCBA-Led Onboarding
Neither founder had time to learn a platform from scratch, and the person who walked them through it was a BCBA.
Every clinical question got a clinical answer. “There was no sense of like: Oh, she doesn’t understand the language,” Dafne says.
19 Staff, One Platform
At the time of publishing, OwlLight Therapy has grown to about 19 staff members. Many of her staff, who work a second job, noticed the ease of a single platform: “It’s all synced up in one.”
When the Clinical Notes Generator arrived, she told her team. “Honestly, we’re a very happy community, so we cheer for everything,” she says. “And our team just started clapping. They’re like, all right, Portia!”
The families noticed, too.
Parents started creating their own accounts and adding photos to their child’s profile without asking for help. “We haven’t heard any complaints about accessibility… no complaints is excellent,” Dafne says.
In their community, many families speak Spanish, and so do Dafne and Elizabeth, which she notes is rarer than it should be: “very limited clinics have clinicians that speak a second language.” Portia’s ABA curriculum is published in English, French, and Spanish.
“I’m a BCBA and Clinical Director of a small clinic near Chicago. As a brand-new practice, a flat-rate billing model felt scary, we had just started, and some months you might not even cover that flat rate. Portia won me over because everything lives in one place, scheduling, data collection, and billing based on how much you actually bill, and I spoke to the same person the whole way through instead of getting passed between salespeople. Here we are in year four and still with Portia. As a small business, having another small business look out for you is everything.”
Dafne Perez-Quinn, Clinical Director, OwlLight Therapy
She frames her recommendation as one small operation backing another. “As a small business supporting another small business is key here because they’re going to be looking out for you,” she says.
To connect with the OwlLight Therapy team, contact them directly or follow them on Facebook and Instagram.
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