Spotlight: Chris Jones @ StreamABA
A spotlight is a short-form interview with a leader in health tech. In this spotlight, you'll hear from Chris Jones, co-founder and CTO of StreamABA.
What does StreamABA do?
StreamABA is a practice management platform built specifically for applied behavior analysis (ABA) providers. We bring scheduling, tracking, reporting, execution, analytics, and management together into a single connected platform, streamlining everything from intake and authorizations to billing and revenue cycle management.
One of the biggest challenges facing ABA providers today is how fragmented the technology landscape is. Many practices still rely heavily on spreadsheets, disconnected software, and manual processes to manage their day-to-day operations. Information gets entered multiple times, workflows fall through the cracks, and staff spend an enormous amount of time just keeping everything in sync.
Our goal with StreamABA is to eliminate that fragmentation. From the moment a family first contacts a practice through service delivery and reimbursement, everything should be connected. Information should move seamlessly throughout the platform, eliminating redundant data entry and the need for staff to manually keep everything in sync.
How did you end up working in health tech?
I've been a software engineer for about 25 years, and healthcare technology has been a recurring part of my career, from mental health to pharmacy services. My co-founder, Jessica, has spent her career in ABA, starting in direct care and eventually moving into clinical leadership.
Through her experience, I got a firsthand look at the operational challenges ABA providers face. I heard countless stories about the administrative burden on staff, the workarounds they had to create, and how much time was spent managing processes that should have been simple.
We started to discuss what it would look like to approach those problems differently, building around the entire workflow rather than solving one isolated problem at a time. Those conversations became the foundation for StreamABA, which grew from addressing a handful of operational challenges into a comprehensive practice management platform.
Jessica brings the clinical and operational expertise, and I bring the engineering side. That combination continues to shape how we build the product.
How does your role intersect with revenue cycle management (RCM)?
I lead the engineering side of StreamABA, and revenue cycle management touches almost everything we build. In ABA, getting paid starts long before a claim is submitted. Between eligibility verification, prior authorizations, scheduling against approved units, and payer-specific billing requirements, a mistake anywhere in the process can lead to denied claims, delayed reimbursement, or lost revenue.
Our approach focuses on preventing those problems upstream rather than fixing them after the fact. Stedi plays an important role in that. We use their APIs for real-time eligibility verification and insurance discovery, helping practices identify coverage early in the intake process and continue monitoring it throughout care.
Medicaid is a great example of why this matters. Families can move between managed care organizations or experience coverage changes without the practice knowing. By the time the billing team discovers the issue, weeks of services may have already been delivered under the wrong coverage.
We're working to make insurance verification a proactive, ongoing process rather than a reactive task. To me, that's where RCM is heading: connecting the entire operation so fewer billing problems happen in the first place.
What do you think RCM will look like two years from now?
I think we're going to see a major shift from reactive revenue cycle management toward proactive, increasingly automated workflows.
One of the biggest changes will be continuous insurance verification. Traditionally, eligibility checks happen during intake or around authorization renewals. With modern APIs, practices can monitor coverage across their entire caseload and catch changes before they impact reimbursement.
I also expect to see less reliance on payer portals and manual administrative processes as direct integrations become more common. Tasks like retrieving remittance information, reconciling payments, and managing payer enrollment should increasingly happen automatically in the background.
AI will play a significant role as well, particularly in interpreting payer responses, identifying denial patterns, and prioritizing follow-up. I don't think it eliminates the need for human oversight, but it has enormous potential to reduce repetitive administrative work. The caveat is that automation is only as good as the underlying data. If everything is scattered across disconnected systems and spreadsheets, adding AI won't magically fix that.
Ultimately, I think the biggest opportunity is making sophisticated revenue cycle management accessible to smaller practices. A 30-person ABA provider should be able to operate with the same efficiency as a much larger healthcare organization, without needing a massive administrative team to make it happen.