Association for Behavior Analysis International

From designing a building and program model to working with insurance companies, the panelists will discuss the lessons they learned from opening the Great Lakes Center for Autism Treatment and Research. Panelists will discuss floor plans, building materials and redesign decisions based upon what children and clinicians taught us after we opened. We will discuss working in an environment in which evidence based practices are not always what the paying customer wants and how we worked through the philosophical and terminology barriers. We will discuss market analysis and all the mistakes we made predicting program growth, as well as what we should have been paying attention to and whom we should have been listening to. We will also discuss the right and wrong ways to grow and some of the pitfalls of ramping up services when the employment market is inconsistent with the service demands. Future opportunities will also be discussed as well as avenues for expanding residential services.