The Session Note Came First. CentralReach’s AI Now Drafts the ABA Reauthorization Report.

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA – CentralReach has released ReportDraftAI, an AI tool that drafts clinical reports, starting with the reauthorization report a payer reads to decide whether a client’s ABA therapy stays covered, the company said on September 22, the second day of its CR Unite conference in Boston. A BCBA picks the client, the report template, and the authorization period; the software pulls the file into a draft; the BCBA writes the clinical case and signs.

CentralReach says the full job takes 9 to 12 hours per report, much of it unbillable, and recurs with each authorization cycle, which payer guidance typically sets at six months. Part of that work can be billed as reassessment time when a payer authorizes it; the rest is administrative and generally cannot be, according to the ABA Coding Coalition. The tool moves the company’s AI from the session note, where its documentation products began in 2024, to the document the next authorization depends on. It arrives as Frontera drafts assessment reports and RethinkBH automates session notes, as the industry’s trade group asks clinicians to disclose AI in their work product, and as insurers deploy AI of their own in prior authorization.

It is also the first product release CentralReach has announced since chief executive Chris Sullens worked his last day on September 4, as BreakingNewsABA reported.

Assembly, Not the Clinical Case

By CentralReach’s description, ReportDraftAI does not write the clinical argument. It does the assembly: it gathers the goals, data, and authorization details that staff would otherwise copy from one screen into another, then hands the BCBA a structured first draft to interpret, justify on medical necessity, and sign. “Our focus is on ensuring that BCBAs are able to spend their time interpreting clinical data and making decisions about care, not copying information from one place to another,” Peter Boumenot, CentralReach’s chief product officer, said in the release. Emily Doak, chief compliance officer at Bloomwell Autism Therapy, said in the same release that the tool “takes on the administrative work without taking away clinical autonomy.”

The release’s two statistics deserve a closer look. The 46% figure holds up, with a caveat. A December 2025 survey of 322 behavior analysts and trainees in Behavior Analysis in Practice found behavior analysts spent 46% of their weekly hours on work away from clients, 29% on supervision, and 14% face-to-face with clients. By the authors’ definition, that 46% includes paperwork and administration, as well as the practitioner’s own training, case collaboration, data analysis, and behavior-plan writing. The 72% burnout figure is older and broader. The release links it to a 2021 survey of 826 ABA practitioners in which 72% of those completing the burnout measure reported medium-to-high burnout; the study did not examine documentation, so the “documentation load” framing is CentralReach’s, not the authors’.

A second tool, VoiceDraftAI, is in beta, the company said in the same release. It turns a clinician’s dictation into tagged chart entries for incidents, supervision, and intake, and customers attending CR Unite were promised priority access as the beta expands.

From Session Notes to Reports

CentralReach introduced AI note auditing and AI-drafted session notes together in July 2024, products it now sells as NoteGuardAI and NoteDraftAI. NoteDraftAI turns collected session data into a draft note for staff to review and submit; one customer, the owner of Learning Garden, said in a CentralReach release that staff finalize notes in about 30 seconds instead of 5 to 50 minutes. By the company’s count, NoteDraftAI has helped draft more than 5.8 million session-note summaries, with RBTs saving an average of 8 hours a week; in August 2026 alone, NoteGuardAI flagged note failures that put $165 million of revenue at risk across more than 400 organizations. The note, in other words, is now drafted by software, edited by staff, and checked by machine. The report is the harder document: in the company’s words, it has to “demonstrate medical necessity and ensure care can continue without disruption.”

Roper Technologies, which bought CentralReach in April 2025 for about $1.85 billion, or $1.65 billion after a $200 million tax benefit, told investors on its July 23, 2026 earnings call that the unit had met its first-year revenue and earnings targets and was “ahead of our deal model,” and that it had “deployed its next generation of AI solutions focused on clinical documentation quality and audit readiness.” Asked on the call which of Roper’s markets would take up AI fastest, chief executive Neil Hunn pointed to autism therapy’s labor gap: “In autism therapy, you have something like 800 million therapy hours demanded, 300 million therapy hours supplied. There’s a line outside the door of every clinic for care.”

Rivals and Silna Work the Same Paperwork

RethinkBH, part of RethinkFirst, launched Session Note AI in March 2026 with a claim of about 10 minutes saved per session. On September 15, 2026, a week before CentralReach’s release, it announced a platform update with AI-assisted session notes, note templates tied to billing codes, and reports formatted for particular payers, for the more than 96,000 providers Rethink says it serves.

Frontera Health, which raised a $32 million seed round co-led by Lux Capital and Lightspeed in February 2025 and runs its own ABA clinics in New Mexico, six by its website’s current count, says its Assessment Builder produces an initial assessment report in about 75% less time than writing one by hand. Since August 2026, BCBAs on the practice-management platform Motivity can start from Frontera drafts of initial assessments, reassessments, and treatment plans, with an automated gap check before submission.

The step after the report already has its own AI vendor, and it plugs into CentralReach. Silna Health, a New York startup that raised $27 million in funding in March 2025, led by Accel and Bain Capital Ventures, automates benefit checks and the ABA authorization lifecycle “from initial assessments to concurrent reviews and re-authorizations,” and lists CentralReach among the systems it connects to. In January 2026, it added a feature that checks clinical documents against payer-specific rules before submission and flags missing or inconsistent information; Silna says requests that clear it see a 98% first-pass acceptance rate, a figure it reports without a sample size or period. Silna’s tool checks documents; it does not describe drafting them. CentralReach’s tool now does the drafting, which puts the two companies on the same packet from opposite ends: one drafts the report, the other grades it against the payer’s rules and files the request.

Payer Software and State AI Laws

Insurers already run AI on their side of the file. In a 2025 survey by state insurance regulators, 84% of the 93 health insurers that responded said they used AI or machine learning, and 68% said they used or were exploring it to review prior authorizations for approval, according to the NAIC. In ABA, billing vendors have told clients that payers use automated analysis to flag coding inconsistencies and documentation gaps, as BreakingNewsABA reported in June. By late May, six states had passed 2026 laws on insurers’ use of AI in claims and prior authorization, ranging from outright limits to disclosure rules, according to the law firm Holland & Knight. Indiana’s, in force since July 1, bars an insurer from using AI as “the sole basis to downcode a claim based on medical necessity” (pay it at a lower-value code) unless a person reviews the patient’s medical record, and bars a provider from using AI “to submit a health benefits claim without the review of a provider or other person involved in the development of the claim.” The law covers state-regulated plans and exempts Medicaid and its managed care plans. It governs claims rather than clinical reports, but it puts a human-review duty on the provider’s side of AI paperwork as well as the insurer’s.

“Clinicians are expected to clearly disclose the use of AI in any work product where it has contributed to the content.” – Council of Autism Service Providers, Practice Parameters for Artificial Intelligence Use in Applied Behavior Analysis (2025)

The industry’s own trade group has already asked for disclosure. The Council of Autism Service Providers’ practice parameters on AI, released in July 2025, say the practitioner “is responsible for clinical documentation,” that clinicians should disclose AI’s contribution to any work product, and that when a payer’s policy is silent on AI, an organization using it for billable work such as treatment-plan writing is best off giving “the payer a transparent description of your intended use.” The parameters are guidance, not payer policy or law. CentralReach’s release describes the review-and-sign-off step. It does not say whether the company or its customers will tell a payer that a report began as an AI draft.

The company has not said when it will name a permanent chief executive. Roper reports Q3 2026 results on October 22, its first results since Sullens stepped down. Roper said in July that CentralReach would count in its organic growth, the figure investors watch, starting with that quarter.

AT A GLANCE

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