STEPS Behavioral Health Expands In-Home ABA in Colorado

The Colorado Announcement

DENVER – On April 29, 2026, STEPS Behavioral Health announced that it had expanded its in-home applied behavior analysis therapy services across Colorado, with care now available to families in Denver, Aurora, Boulder, and other communities in the state. In the same announcement, the Maryland-based provider said it is actively evaluating spaces for a future Colorado clinic, positioning the in-home rollout as the first move in a larger entry into the state. The company framed the expansion as a way to widen access to early intervention and behavioral support for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, delivering therapy in what it called the child’s natural environment while involving families directly in treatment.

A company representative, quoted but not named in the announcement, said in-home therapy lets children “learn in an environment where they feel safe and comfortable,” and described the clinic as groundwork the company is now beginning to lay. The release, distributed through PR Newswire and picked up by trade outlets including Becker’s Behavioral Health, describes therapy delivered in the home under the supervision of a behavior analyst, with individualized plans focused on communication, social skills, learning, and daily living skills. It is, in form, a routine provider-expansion announcement. How STEPS is entering Colorado is the more interesting part.

Who STEPS Is

STEPS Behavioral Health is a founder-led ABA provider based in Maryland, not one of the large national platforms that dominate headlines about the autism care business. It was founded in 2008 by Erin Stern, a board certified behavior analyst who started the company while teaching in Maryland’s Howard County public schools and still serves as its president. The company operates three clinics in Maryland, in Towson, Pikesville, and Columbia, and provides in-home ABA therapy across Maryland, Georgia, and Colorado. Its services extend beyond core ABA to an early intervention program for children aged 18 months to five years, evening social skills groups, and speech and occupational therapy provided through a sister company, The Therapy Spot.

In May 2026, weeks after the Colorado announcement, STEPS added another service line: autism diagnostic evaluations for children under five, delivered by licensed psychologists through a mix of virtual and in-person assessment and billed to insurance, including Medicaid for eligible families. Stern tied the move to a familiar bottleneck in autism care, casting faster diagnosis as a way to move children into intervention sooner. The launch signals where the company is heading, toward a model that controls more of the path a family travels, from first concern to evaluation to therapy.

“Families often wait months for evaluations.” – Erin Stern, founder and president, STEPS Behavioral Health (2026)

The In-Home-First Playbook

The sequencing of the Colorado entry is as telling as the entry itself. Rather than sign a lease, build out a clinic, and then work to fill it, STEPS is entering homes first and scouting a clinic second. For a provider expanding into a new state, that order has clear financial logic. In-home services require no real estate commitment or construction, they let a company begin billing Medicaid and commercial payers as soon as it secures contracts and credentials its clinicians, and they allow it to build a caseload and a referral base before locking in a fixed location. Demonstrated demand can then justify a clinic, which opens with families already in the pipeline rather than as a speculative bet on foot traffic.

The approach is not without trade-offs, and the company’s stated plan suggests it knows them. Home-based care carries costs that clinic models do not, including clinician travel time, more complex supervision logistics, and lower scheduling density than a center where several children are seen under one roof. Clinic-based care, in turn, offers things a living room cannot: peer interaction, group social skills programming, and a controlled environment for certain kinds of teaching. STEPS’ decision to start at home and add a clinic later reads less as a choice between the two models than as a sequencing of them, using the lower-risk channel to establish a market and the higher-investment channel to deepen it.

An Independent in a Consolidating Field

STEPS is expanding into Colorado in an industry reshaped over the past decade by private-equity-backed consolidation, in which well-funded platforms have acquired regional ABA providers and pursued rapid, multi-site growth. STEPS presents a different profile. It remains independent, with Erin Stern as founder and president and no private-equity backer announced. Its growth has been incremental rather than acquisitive: three Maryland clinics built over years, in-home expansion into Georgia and now Colorado, and a recent step into diagnostics that adds a front door to its own therapy services. That trajectory makes it a useful counterpoint to the consolidation story that dominates coverage of the ABA business, and a test of whether organic, founder-led expansion can keep pace in markets where capital increasingly favors scale.

In Colorado specifically, the mechanics of entry run through the state’s payer structure. STEPS says it works with Colorado’s Medicaid Regional Accountable Entities, the regional organizations that coordinate care and administer the behavioral health benefit within the state’s Medicaid program, as well as commercial insurers. Those contracts are central to any ABA provider’s ability to serve families at scale, since the cost of therapy is borne overwhelmingly by insurance rather than out of pocket. Securing them is the unglamorous but decisive work that determines whether an expansion announcement translates into served families, and it is a step an in-home-first model lets a provider complete before sinking capital into a building.

What Comes Next

For the autism care market, STEPS’ Colorado expansion is a small but instructive data point: a repeatable, comparatively low-risk way for an independent provider to test a new state. That independence offers a counterweight to the assumption that meaningful growth in ABA now requires private-equity capital.

AT A GLANCE

SOURCES & REFERENCES