Huey Health Is Improving Care for People with Autism by Taking ABA Therapy Virtual
Co-founders Raffay Mirza and Labib Tazwar Rahman joined forces to build a platform that could solve a care challenge they’d experienced in their own families. Now they’re sharing it with the world.
Challenge
Imagine this: after a year of visiting doctors and specialists and undergoing test after test, your child becomes one of the one in 44 children in the US who is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). You’re told that applied behavioral analysis (ABA) therapy is the gold standard treatment for your child, but there are so few therapists available that you have to wait another six to 12 months before you can even begin. In the meantime, the medical bills are piling up and you’ve lost wages because of the time demands of caring for your child. Eventually, you get your child into regular ABA therapy only to discover that it takes an average of 15–30 hours a week. The therapist gives you “homework” — skills to practice with your child — but you’re so overwhelmed that you either forget about it or constantly feel like you’re doing it wrong.
This scenario is not rare. It’s the norm for family caregivers of people with ASD. The cost of caring for a child with ASD is approximately $60k a year, mostly through paying for special services and lost wages. While the financial burden is high, the time and emotional burden also take a toll on the entire family. No person has more than 24 hours in a day, and if a large portion of that time is spent meeting the needs of a disabled child, that’s time not spent with other children, your spouse, or meeting your own needs. An ASD diagnosis truly changes everything about a family’s dynamics.
Raffay Mirza knows this all too well. His younger brother has ASD and he watched as it impacted every decision his family made. His father’s job meant they moved around quite a bit as he grew up, and Mirza saw the time and effort it took to establish and maintain a care routine and care providers for his brother in each new place. He saw the stress it put on his parents to constantly figure out a plan for his brother and how certain places they lived lacked the resources they needed.
What would it look like, Mirza wondered, to create something that reduced the time and cost burden of care for a family? How could he free up more time for people like his mother, time they could spend with other children or doing something for themselves? How do you make ABA therapy more accessible and also transfer some of these skills to family members so they didn’t always have to carve out 15–30 hours a week for therapy?
Origin Story
Mirza wasn’t the only one asking these questions. Through an online networking platform called “Lunch Club,” he met Labib Tazwar Rahman. Like Mirza, Rahman had a younger sibling with a disability, in his case, cerebral palsy.
“I think we got matched up to talk because we were two brown people with disabled siblings who were interested in tech,” Mirza says with a laugh. The two discovered they had complementary skills: Mirza worked in mergers & acquisitions for Deloitte and understood the financial side of business and Rahman was a programmer studying computer science at Stanford University. Together they started to daydream about what they wished existed for their own families when they were growing up.
At the same time, the pandemic was disrupting normal care for patients who relied on ABA therapy. And the disruption wasn’t all bad. An interesting thing happened when the ABA interventions that typically happened in person moved online: both the parents and the therapists experienced greater satisfaction. Parents got time back in their day, no longer constantly schlepping their child to and from appointments. They also felt more connected to what happened in a session and better able to apply the skills themselves. Therapists reported feeling better about their jobs because they were teaching family members to be more self-reliant in the long run. The icing on the cake was that insurance companies noticed better outcomes achieved at a lower cost.
A light bulb went off for Mirza and Rahman. What if they could create a virtual care platform for ABA therapy, one that modeled evidenced-based methods for parents and other family members, teaching them the skills they need to apply ABA methods regularly at home? What if they could give families back a few precious hours in their days and make caretaking a more satisfying experience? What if life could be different for families like their own?
Under the Hood
Driven by their personal experiences and these questions, they created Huey. Huey is a digital provider of family coaching and behavioral therapy services. Essentially, it connects families to virtual ABA care and uses a Duolingo-style coaching experience within the platform so the families can practice using ABA in a way that is easy for them to do. Huey pairs families with a licensed ABA provider and also provides step-by-step guidance, video tutorials, practice sessions that can be recorded, and live feedback so that caregivers feel confident using ABA skills throughout the week, with better results for less money.
Huey also creates a space for family members, teachers, and other people in the child’s community to get on the same page. Most children with ASD have some sort of physical diary that records likes, dislikes, foods to suggest and avoid, what to do if the child has a tantrum, among other guidelines. Huey takes that manual diary and brings it online so that every member of the child’s community can access disability-specific behavioral guidance for all sorts of situations, at all times.
To begin, Huey will focus on autism and then Mirza and Rahman will build out the platform for other disabilities. They anticipate going live in late 2022 and are in the process of becoming an in-network provider for insurance companies. ABA therapy for autistic children is considered medically necessary and is reimbursed in almost all 50 states. To make sure the product incorporates best practices, they have an advisory panel of ABA pioneers and professionals, affiliated with institutions like Stanford University, Harvard, Seattle Children’s Hospital, and the Rush University Medical Center.
The intent is for Huey to become the provider itself and not just a resource for ABA therapists to use on their own. That way, Huey can uplift the care experience from start to finish, teaching and training ABA therapists to use their tools and maximize the impact for families. The coaching sessions will be tailored to each family’s unique domestic circumstances, keeping in mind how each child’s disability manifests itself on a day-to-day basis.
The goal is not only to address immediate issues but equip all members of the family with the right skill set to deal with issues independently as they arise in the future. Care for autistic family members never really stops, and the responsibility of care often passes from the parents to the siblings later in life.
“To this day,” Mirza explains, “we still go through it as a family and my brother is 25. We still need to understand how to apply different behavioral response techniques, different speech therapy techniques, and how to keep everyone on the same page with information like food requirements and behavioral needs.”
Why We’re Proud to Invest
With Huey, Mirza and Rahman built their platform to help their own families’ needs. We’re incredibly proud to back a team that’s solving problems out of their own lived experience because we know how powerful that motivation can be. By figuring out solutions to their own challenges, they are poised to offer a scalable model of care that provides better health outcomes at a lower cost, saves families time and money, and most importantly of all, improves relationships between children with autism and their families.
We’re also excited to back Huey because they bring an important and interesting global perspective to the challenge of disability care. They’ve lived in a combined eight countries, from Pakistan to Australia to the United States, and gleaned lessons from each. They’re leveraging that experience to question the status quo and reimagine what virtual disability care could look like. It’s this global perspective that often leads to leapfrog innovation, as entrepreneurs see entrenched problems from a new angle.
Finally, we’re proud to back Mirza and Rahman because they’re addressing a high-need area that’s lacked innovation and investment for too long. Families caring for children with autism or other severe disabilities face massive financial and emotional challenges, yet they often bear the weight quietly. These stories rarely make headlines, yet they have a deep impact on families and communities, leading to burnout, depression, and anxiety. We need smart, motivated entrepreneurs like Mirza and Rahman to take these challenges on, applying the best of technology to everyday care challenges.
Join us in welcoming Huey Health to the StartUp Health family.
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