PLYMOUTH, MINNESOTA — The ABA industry has spent the past decade building capacity — more clinics, more BCBAs, more RBTs, more technology to train and supervise a growing workforce. What it has not solved is the problem that precedes all of that: the average wait time between a parent’s first concern about their child’s development and a confirmed autism diagnosis remains twelve to twenty-four months.

A child referred at eighteen months may not be diagnosed until nearly age four. The early intervention window most associated with the best outcomes — before age three — can close entirely before a family ever books an intake appointment at an ABA clinic.

Jamie Pagliaro spent most of his career on the delivery side of that problem. At RethinkFirst, where he worked for sixteen years and seven months across multiple roles, he built what became one of the most widely used technology platforms in behavioral health: a cloud-based system for BCBA supervision documentation, 40-hour RBT training, continuing education, clinical data collection, and practice management that by 2022 was serving more than 30,000 clinicians logging over 20 million clinical data points per year.

In August 2025, he left to run EarliPoint Health. The pivot is not a departure from the autism care infrastructure problem — it is a move upstream to address the part of the pipeline that has resisted technological intervention the longest.

SIXTEEN YEARS BUILDING RETHINK

Pagliaro came to the autism field through direct service work before taking on a leadership role as Executive Director of the New York Center for Autism Charter School — the first charter school in New York State exclusively dedicated to children with autism spectrum disorders. When he joined the company that would become RethinkFirst in January 2009, originally named Rethink Autism, the question he was trying to answer was straightforward: how do you train enough staff to deliver evidence-based ABA therapy when demand is growing faster than any in-person training model can scale?

His answer was video-based training delivered over the internet. The 40-hour RBT curriculum, the supervision documentation tools, the continuing education modules — all of it was built on the premise that the workforce bottleneck in ABA was fundamentally a training and supervision infrastructure problem, and that technology was the only lever that could solve it at the speed the field required. Pagliaro held a B.A. with honors in psychology from Wesleyan University and an MBA from Villanova, and he approached the product challenge less as a clinician than as an operator who understood both the learning science and the organizational dynamics of running programs for people with disabilities.

The model proved out decisively in March 2020, when the pandemic forced ABA clinics to move their training operations remote almost overnight. Rethink’s platform was already there. The company had spent a decade building what the rest of the industry was about to urgently need.

“Children who are referred at 18 months may not be diagnosed until they’re almost four. That lost time makes all the difference.”

By the time Pagliaro transitioned to Chief Operating Officer of RethinkFirst in January 2025 — overseeing customer success, product management, content development, and revenue cycle management for the PE-backed behavioral health SaaS platform — K1 Investment Management had already backed the company, RethinkFirst had completed five acquisitions including TotalTherapy, and the platform was embedded in the operations of more than 600 behavioral practice groups nationwide. He left in July 2025, seven months after taking the COO role.

EARLIPOINT: THE FDA-CLEARED DEVICE THAT WATCHES WHERE BABIES LOOK

EarliPoint Health — formerly EarliTec Diagnostics until its rebrand on October 7, 2025 — was founded on research developed over more than twenty years by Dr. Ami Klin and Dr. Warren Jones, scientists at Yale University and Emory University. Their foundational discovery: children with autism look at the world differently. In typical development, infants and toddlers naturally orient toward faces, gestures, and social cues — the visual anchors of human communication. Children with autism show measurably different patterns of visual attention from an early age, differences detectable long before the behavioral signs that typically trigger a clinical referral.

The EarliPoint System translates that scientific insight into a clinical device. A child watches a series of short, age-appropriate videos on a tablet while the device tracks their eye movements in real time. The resulting data — captured using Dynamic Quantification of Social-Visual Engagement, or DQSVE — is compared against age-expected metrics and generates a report scoring the child across three clinically aligned indices: language, cognition, and social engagement. The assessment takes a fraction of the time of conventional protocols, which typically involve three to six hours of specialist observation and can require months to schedule.

The FDA cleared the EarliPoint Evaluation in July 2022, making it the first FDA-authorized tool to aid in autism diagnosis and assessment in children as young as 16 months. That clearance matters in two ways. It gives the technology credibility with the healthcare system that drives referrals and reimbursement. And it gives ABA providers a way to differentiate their practices — offering families an objective, quantitative diagnostic input that most clinics cannot currently provide.

The company raised a $21.5 million Series B led by Nexus NeuroTech Ventures and Venture Investors Health Fund. Pagliaro was appointed President and CEO effective August 1, 2025, and on October 7 announced the rebrand from EarliTec to EarliPoint Health alongside the launch of the EarliPoint Network — a model designed to connect families with provider partners serving as evaluation locations.

THE STRATEGIC LOGIC: DIAGNOSIS AS A REFERRAL ENGINE

Pagliaro’s move to EarliPoint is not simply a career change — it is a thesis about where the autism care pipeline breaks down first and hardest. The training infrastructure he built at Rethink addresses a downstream problem: once a child has a diagnosis, how do you ensure there are enough qualified people to treat them? EarliPoint addresses the upstream problem: how do you accelerate the diagnosis itself so the downstream infrastructure can actually be used?

The EarliPoint Network makes the commercial logic explicit. By positioning evaluation locations as intake points that can connect families to ABA providers, early intervention programs, and other services, EarliPoint is building a referral pipeline for the entire autism care sector. A device that shortens the diagnostic wait from two years to a single clinic visit does not just help the individual child — it increases the throughput of the entire system.

The pitch to ABA providers is equally direct: a practice offering FDA-cleared, objective diagnostic support can attract families earlier in their care journey, before they have established relationships with competing providers. In a market where competition for early-diagnosis referrals is intensifying, the diagnostic capability functions as both a clinical differentiator and a patient acquisition strategy.

THE REMAINING QUESTIONS

The technology’s promise is real, but the path to mainstream clinical adoption involves challenges that FDA clearance does not resolve on its own. Reimbursement for novel diagnostic tools typically lags clearance by years, and pediatricians and developmental specialists who control referrals are notoriously conservative adopters of new assessment technology. The EarliPoint System is designed to complement rather than replace conventional diagnostic tools, but clinical workflows are slow to change — particularly in community-based settings where the families with the longest wait times are most concentrated.

Pagliaro is also navigating a company of approximately 36 employees, a significant step down in organizational scale from the 500-person operation he left at RethinkFirst. The EarliPoint Network model depends on building a critical mass of provider partners to be useful to families, which requires sustained commercial execution over the next several years.

None of that makes the bet irrational. Pagliaro built one company’s platform from a K-12 education tool into a behavioral health infrastructure reportedly valued at close to $1.5 billion. The question is whether the operator skills that scaled Rethink translate to the earlier-stage challenge of bringing a hardware-and-software diagnostic platform to clinical mainstream adoption. The two problems are adjacent. They are not identical.

AT A GLANCE

Full Name: Jamie Pagliaro
Current Title: President & CEO, EarliPoint Health (formerly EarliTec Diagnostics)
Location: Plymouth, Minnesota
Education: B.A. with Honors, Psychology, Wesleyan University; MBA, Villanova University
Appointed CEO: August 1, 2025
Prior Role: Chief Operating Officer, RethinkFirst (January–July 2025)
RethinkFirst Tenure: 16+ years (January 2009–July 2025); grew behavioral health platform to 30,000+ clinicians and 20M+ clinical data points/year
Earlier Career: Executive Director, New York Center for Autism Charter School (first charter school in New York State dedicated to children with ASD)
EarliPoint Device: EarliPoint™ Evaluation — FDA-cleared (July 2022); first FDA-authorized tool to aid autism diagnosis in children as young as 16 months; uses eye-tracking (DQSVE technology)
Scientific Founders: Dr. Ami Klin & Dr. Warren Jones (Yale University / Emory University / Marcus Autism Center)
Funding: $21.5M Series B (led by Nexus NeuroTech Ventures & Venture Investors Health Fund)
Rebrand: EarliTec Diagnostics → EarliPoint Health (October 7, 2025); launched EarliPoint Network
EarliPoint Network: Provider partner model connecting families with evaluation locations for accelerated diagnosis and referral to treatment
Company Size: ~36 employees (2025)
RethinkFirst Scale: 500+ employees; 600+ behavioral practice groups; backed by K1 Investment Management; 5 acquisitions including TotalTherapy
Industry Experience: ~30 years in autism services, behavioral health, and education technology

CONTACT & LINKS

Organization: EarliPoint Health
Title: President & CEO
Location: Plymouth, Minnesota
Website: earlipointhealth.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamiepagliaro
Prior Company: RethinkFirst (2009–2025)