Cognoa for Employers Officially Launches, Giving Parents Access to Child Development Support Through Their Employers

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 30, 2016) - Cognoa, an artificial intelligence and healthcare company helping parents evaluate their child's development through its app, today announces the launch of Cognoa for Employers. Through employers, Cognoa now offers parents direct access to its clinically validated child behavioral development assessment for parents to complete in the comfort and privacy of their own home. Cognoa for Employers addresses a top concern for parents, while also providing peace of mind, increased productivity and lower healthcare and employee costs through earlier detection of child developmental delays.

Through its development and validation, Cognoa has already helped parents and clinicians with early screening of 140,000 children. Based on the company's own data, for every 1,000 employees, Cognoa can help parents by enabling earlier treatment of 35 children with potential developmental delays, including seven with high risk of autism. Parents usually notice the signs of developmental delays in their children by 18 months of age, yet the average wait for parents to receive diagnosis and treatment for important delays, such as autism and ADHD, is three to five years. By enabling earlier diagnosis and treatment for children with potential delays, Cognoa is able to shorten the path to diagnosis while simultaneously lowering healthcare costs.

"Cognoa for Employers is putting the power of early screening in parents' hands while giving employers the opportunity to provide competitive health benefits beyond normal employee expectations," said Brent Vaughan, CEO of Cognoa. "With developmental delay affecting one in six U.S. children and autism affecting one in 68, it is no wonder that developmental milestones and potential delays consistently rank as top concerns for parents. Providing parents with a validated path to earlier answers not only saves money and time in appointments, but just as importantly, allows parents to remain focused at work."

As one parent shared with Cognoa: "I was more effective at work, knowing that [my daughter] Ava was in good care and was confident that her therapists and teachers at school were helping her in more ways than I could."

Currently available for self-insured employers, Cognoa for Employers helps parents take a more active role in supporting their child's development by providing access to the company's short, clinically validated developmental assessment, which also can assess samples of the child's natural behavior at home via short videos uploaded by the parent. Parents receive detailed reports to share with their doctor as well as clinician-based advice on how they can start helping their child's development at home, based upon feedback from tens of thousands of parents like them.

"As a child psychiatrist, I have seen the frustration of parents who get lost in the system while they're trying to get their children the help that they need," said Dr. H. Eric Bender, M.D. "Cognoa's evidence-based assessment can offer parents and clinicians helpful information that can put them on the right path to the right treatment at the right time. This can have profound, lasting impacts not only on the child's development, but also on the well-being of the entire family."

Cognoa for Employers' dashboard easily fits into current healthcare platforms. To learn more, please visit https://www.cognoa.com/employers.

About Cognoa:
Cognoa is digital health company that is changing how parents understand and support their child's development and how employers improve the lives of their parent employees. Already one of the largest screeners of children's development, Cognoa gives parents peace of mind by identifying where a child is on track and what parents can do to help the child improve. Cognoa's Harvard-developed evaluation has been trusted and used by 150,000 parents and has been validated in multiple scientific and clinical studies. It is based on more than five years of clinical research and validation studies led by Dennis Wall, PhD, at prominent institutions including Harvard Medical School and Stanford Medical School.

Cognoa hopes to help parents take a more active role in supporting their child's development by offering valuable tools for understanding and improving cognitive and behavioral development as early as possible and to make the best choices going forward.