Mastering KPIs in Your ABA Practice: Drive Success & Growth 📈

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential metrics to evaluate your ABA practice’s performance, guiding strategic planning and ensuring success. They are a measurement system that can exist in an objectives and key results (OKR) strategic framework. 

KPIs typically fall into four categories: 

• Operations
• Clinical
• Financial
• Stakeholder satisfaction 

A well-rounded approach to KPIs ensures all aspects of your business are interconnected, supporting growth and progress.

For smaller ABA practices, starting with a few KPIs is sometimes a good idea. As your business scales up, your KPIs will expand too. Monitoring KPIs benefits different stakeholders, offering valuable insights for decision-making that ultimately lead to better outcomes for everyone. 

Related performance systems and measures should take into account who does what by when and how all those activities and how outcomes impact one another – i.e. do they compliment or conflict. Activities and outcomes are both important considerations. 

Below are some common KPI focus areas for ABA companies. This is not exhaustive, and there is no one “right” set of objectives. Different professionals may prioritize different objectives. 

Examples of clinical metrics:

1. Patient feedback surveys
2. Family feedback surveys
3. Are your patients making progress on their treatment goals?
4. Percentage of objectives with interobserver agreement (IOA)
5. Percent of students for which IOA data are collected
6. Percentage of objectives with procedural integrity
7. Percent of student objectives which are met or exceeded
8. Percentage of objectives showing experimental control in the assessment or treatment process
9. Rates of cancellation by client as well as by staff
10. Are your clients’ families or other caregivers engaged in the treatment process?
11. Do you have the right ratio of direct to supervision hours?
12. Decrease critical incidents
13. Client onboarding timeline
14. Client self audits (program and billing) with 100%
15. Clients self audits completed
16. BCBA checklists completed
17. BCBA checklists passed
18. BT checklists
19. Checklists for each position
20. Percent cases with interdisciplinary efforts

Examples of operational metrics:

1. Claims, Latency between claim submission and payment received (processing time)
2. How many accounts are 30, 60, or 90 days past due?
3. Intake timeline
4. Percent sessions scheduled from available
5. Percent performed from scheduled
6. Utilization – are you utilizing all authorized units or fulfilling all contracted hours (are you leaving money on the table)?
7. Rate of denial
8. Rate of appeal success
9. Is your documentation inclusive of all required indicators per payer guidelines (can you justify the medical necessity of your service if you bill insurance companies)?
10. Average caseload for behavior analysts
11. Training and professional development
12. Community partnerships
13. Are you conducting internal self-audits?
14. Recruitment and retention measures – how many technicians are your behavior analysts supervising?  What is your average caseload for behavior analysts?
15. Training compliance and professional development?
16. Do you have community partnerships?  If so, how engaging is that relationship? 

Examples of financial and growth metrics:

1. Revenue
2. Profit
3. Increase clients served
4. States served
5. Authorized hours per client
6. Increase in percent used of authorized – utilization. Service authorizations fulfilled.
7. Number of service hours
8. Increase in funding sources served
9. Increase in types of funding sources insurance,  state waiver, schools, federal programs, other?
10. Cash in bank

HR objectives: 

1. Payroll completed with 100 percent accuracy
2. Turnover/retention
3. Recruiting, Hiring and training timeline BTs and BCBAs 
4. Employee satisfaction survey 
5. Employee performance 
6. Productivity/efficiency
7. Cancellations (staff and clients)
8. Recruitment costs 
9. Interviews per month
10. Hires per month 
11. Recruiting 
12. Retention/turnover

Other KPIs to consider:

1. Rev cycle management objectives 
2. Response time to new clients
3. Time to initiate services from initial request
4. Financials/books upkept monthly
5. Expand product/service lines
6. Expand to new markets

Do you think there are any crucial KPIs missing from our list? Share your thoughts in the comments below ⬇️. 

Brandon Herscovitch, Ph.D., LABA, BCBA-D

Partners Behavioral Health can help with your clinical and business standards, compliance, and outcomes. We can help you scale an ethical ABA practice you’re proud about.