PASADENA and PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 11, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Autism Learning Partners ("ALP"), a national leader in the treatment of autism and other developmental disabilities, and Cognoa, the leading digital therapeutics company focused on pediatric behavioral health, announced today a partnership designed to accelerate the diagnosis of autism to enable interventions earlier, when there is the greatest potential to improve lifelong outcomes.
Through this partnership, ALP will provide parents the Cognoa for Child Development app. By using the Cognoa app, parents will receive information assessing their child's developmental progress as well as personalized evidence-based activities to support their child’s development across key areas including gross motor skills and social emotional development. Additionally, Cognoa will enable ALP clinicians to identify children at risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and direct children to the most appropriate next steps, including expedited diagnostic evaluations to ensure that children receive ABA therapy services when needed.
Autism is a behavioral condition with clear unmet needs. The average age of autism diagnosis has not improved for over 15 years and remains at 4 years, 4 months, missing the early intervention window. Cognoa’s screening assessment can identify children at risk for autism as young as 18 months. Parents who have behavioral concerns and/or notice developmental delays do so at around 13 months of age, yet they often are forced to wait one to three years to receive the proper diagnosis and treatment for their child due to growing shortages of behavioral health specialists, leading to long wait times and the under-utilization of treatment.
“We at Autism Learning Partners are excited to partner with Cognoa. This partnership reflects our long-standing commitment to investing in new technologies that have the potential to expedite diagnosis of autism, thereby helping families to access needed care,” said Richard Fish, CEO of Autism Learning Partners. “We are looking forward to integrating Cognoa’s solutions into ALP’s services to help parents better understand their child’s behavioral health and development and to enable our clinicians to help children at risk for autism so that indicated services can be introduced as early as possible.”
“We are excited to partner with ALP, one of the leading, progressive ABA therapy providers in the country, to expand access to early intervention and evidence-based care for more families,” said Brent Vaughan, CEO and co-founder of Cognoa. “Therapy providers play an essential role in ensuring all children can benefit from early intervention. With our partnership, ALP is not only empowering families to better support their children’s developmental health at home, but also helping advance Cognoa’s mission to improve the standard of care in pediatric behavioral health by making early intervention available to every child.”
“Early identification and intervention are critical for children with autism and developmental delays,” said Dr. Tom Megerian, Pediatric Neurologist and Medical Director, Thompson Autism Center at CHOC Children’s. “Getting a diagnosis can often be a challenging and time-consuming effort for parents, but necessary in order to facilitate optimal interventions. There is tremendous need for earlier diagnosis of neurodevelopmental conditions like autism, and it’s exciting to see ALP and Cognoa partner to address this need with innovative and clinically-validated technology for identifying children at risk for ASD. I am excited to see technologies being developed to empower primary care clinicians to be better able to make diagnoses at the point of care possible for the right patients.”
Cognoa is developing solutions to provide a continuum of care from identifying at-risk children through its screener to empowering early diagnosis and treatment of behavioral health conditions through its prescription digital therapeutics and medicines. By targeting the critical, early neurodevelopmental windows, Cognoa’s digital therapeutics promote neuromodulation of specific brain networks, improving functional connectivity for lifelong gains.
About Autism Learning Partners
Autism Learning Partners (ALP) is a private and full-service provider specializing in the treatment of autism and other developmental disabilities and has been a national leader in the special needs field for over 30 years. ALP is headquartered in Pasadena, California and provides in-home and in-clinic ABA-based care across the country to over 4,000 families. ALP’s services include: Applied Behavioral Analysis, social skills classes, speech, occupational, and physical therapies. Autism Learning Partners now offers treatment services in seventeen states including; California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah and Washington. Families seeking services or support can contact 888-805-0759 or visit: http://www.autismlearningpartners.com/.
About Cognoa, Inc.
Cognoa is advancing the standard of pediatric behavioral healthcare with digital therapeutics and medicines that enable earlier identification, diagnosis and treatment for improved lifelong outcomes. Our lead prescription products, the first digital diagnostic aid and the first prescription digital therapeutic for autism, have both received Breakthrough Device designation from the FDA. Cognoa’s product pipeline addresses other indications including ADHD and anxiety. Available today through employers, health plans and treatment providers, the Cognoa for Child Development app has been used by more than 300,000 parents to screen for risk of developmental delays as well as track and support their child’s developmental health. For more information, visit https://www.cognoa.com/
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