Meet Michael Maloney, Founder and CEO of LEARN Behavioral
Michael Maloney, Founder and CEO of LEARN Behavioral, joins us to share about his early career in education and how a small consulting company grew into an organization that now provides autism services in over 17 states (23 with LEARN Academy). In this conversation, we also explore his insights about the changing landscape of services for families.
Michael shares, “In the last ten to twelve years, there has been an absolute sea change. When we started, four states covered services, and now all 50 do. Parents often had to pay out of pocket, and few could afford to. The financial burden has lessened so significantly because of the growing awareness and advocacy.”
Meet Michael Maloney, Founder and CEO of LEARN Behavioral
All Autism Talk
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www.learnbehavioral.com
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Richie Ploesch
Michael, thanks so much for joining us this week. Happy to have you on the show.
Michael Maloney
Thanks for having me.
Richie
I realized that as I was getting ready for our time that like you and I spent a lot of time working together and I talked to you regularly and often, but I don't know a lot about you as a person. So I know that you live in in Maryland, but did you grow up in Maryland?
Michael
No, I actually grew up in Massachusetts, in Western Massachusetts, Springfield, and lived there through high school. I wound up in the Maryland area because I went to college in Washington, DC in 87 and wound up staying in Washington. I met my future wife there. We lived in DC until I think 2001, 2002, and then moved to Baltimore. So I've sort of been a mid-Atlantic creature, you know, ever since the mid 80s. But no, Massachusetts is still very near and dear to my heart. My mom still lives in Western Mass. And we actually, we have a clinic in Springfield. So I know the area and I know that clinic very well. But yeah, I've been away from home, which, gosh, is that like almost 40 years? Gosh, it's a long time.
Richie
It's almost, yeah, yeah. So you get to go back a lot, but what brought you, went to, you went to college in DC. What, what inspired you or that?
Michael
Yeah, I went to Catholic University in Washington, D.C. It was interesting because I the opportunity. I applied to Boston College. I got into Boston College and it was a really good school. I really excited about it. But my sister, my older sister, was living in D.C. at the time. She had just graduated college, was working for the Environmental Protection Agency. So I went to visit her in D.C. and I just was fascinated. I fell in love with the city, sort just everything about it-not just the seat of government, but it was just like all the monuments and it was just like really alluring. And so I went to a school that no one's ever heard of really. I usually tell people I went to Catholic University in Washington, D.C. and they say, you mean Georgetown? And I'm like, no, I didn't go to Georgetown. But yeah, and that's kind of how I wound up there. I just, I fell in love with the city and I kind of wanted to get out of my comfort zone kind of thing. And, know, lo and behold, you know, I've been there pretty much ever since.
Richie
Yeah, That's great. You mentioned older sisters. You mentioned your mom. Were those your kind of your big influencers as you were growing up?
Michael
Yeah, well, I have two older sisters, five and six years older. So, you I always looked up to them and they took care of me as like the little, you brother. So absolutely, you know, I mean, from everything, like I got my first paper out when I was eight years old, because I took it over from my sister who was going to college, not college, but going to high school and couldn't do the paper route anymore. So yeah, my sisters were a really big influence. My mom, my dad-I was a child of the 70s and so it was very different. was like, you know, we had, we didn't have color TV, I don't think until my sophomore year of high school. So it was really like, get up in the morning, get on your bike, ride to school, ride around the neighborhood, you know, and then rush home when your mom, you know, is driving around the neighborhood, screaming your name, saying you're late for dinner kind of thing.
But, but yeah, my, my sister certainly. You know, my mom, my dad, you know, yeah, it was, you know, kind of like, you know, it was a very what you would expect of a, you know, a whole cadre of kids. Like I would get on the bus. I think there were like 26 kids at my bus stop in our neighborhood and, know, they had busing in Massachusetts. So we went to like a community school. Yeah. And it was like, you know, it was just always outside regardless of the weather, the time of year, you know, and not a lot of like parental supervision. My mom was a teacher, so we were all latchkey kids. So that same experience of coming home at 3.30, starving and finding like nothing in the cabinet and making like jelly turnovers with Bisquick and grape jelly or like, just that kind of thing. was like you would expect.
Richie
laughing as you're describing these because it reminds me so much of my childhood. My dad had a whistle and so he would just whistle and we would come from wherever we were in the neighborhood and we'd come from backyards, other people's houses, the open space behind the house. We'd hop the fences and come back home. It was just like all of-
Michael
Yes, that's exactly right. It's so funny you say that, when I was late and my mom got really mad, she'd get in the car and drive around. And my friends would warn me, she's like screaming down the street in her like 1972 Monte Carlo. And I would hide in the bushes and say, hey, don't tell her, tell her you haven't seen me. And then I would race her home by jumping the fence and like getting in through the back door and, you know, try to pretend that I had been home all along. It didn't always work, but yeah, that's the way it was.
Richie
Yeah.
Michael
Either that or if it got dark, you when the streetlights came on, you had to be in, you know. Yeah.
Richie
Yeah, that was the time. Yep. Yep. that's so interesting. So your mom was a teacher and is that what drew you to education? Is that what got you interested in?
Michael
Yeah, I think to some extent, because she was a teacher, she taught elementary and then she went on to get her master's degree in ESL. And when she did that, she kind of got moved around the city by the district. And so my first couple of years, I didn't go to my neighborhood school. I just would get in the car and go to school with her. So yeah, I spent a lot of time growing up, decorating cork boards in the hallway in the classroom and then pulling them down.
Richie
Hmm. Yeah.
Michael
-you know, whenever like my sisters were busy, I would have to come, I mean, I would go to her with like, there were staff meetings after school, like all my friends got to go home early, I had to wait until, you know, my mom's staff meeting was over at 4.30, that kind of thing. So yeah, that was definitely an influence. I would say another influence, I had really great teachers, even from like elementary school. And I just always looked up to my teachers, I can remember my first grade teacher and second grade teacher, Mrs. Prazier. And because I had a mom as a teacher, I remember in second grade, I was just really quick at doing my addition and subtraction problems. And so she just decided that I was too, and then I would become like a self-control problem, because I would start talking.
Richie
Yeah. Yep.
Michael
And so she thought I was so advanced, I should go upstairs with the third and fourth grade. And so I did, and I was handed this workbook with like multiplication and division, had no idea what it meant. It was just guessing my way through, totally intimidated by all these older kids. So I went home and told my mom that night that I got moved upstairs for math. And I said, I don't even know what this means. Like what is the line with the dot on the top and the dot on the bottom? And you would think she would call the school and say, my son's not ready for that. But because she was an educator, I got a crash course in division that night for like an hour and I stayed in that math class, you know?
But yeah, and then in middle school, we had a New North Community School, which was like this great school with relatively new concept with, had all these, like we had pods as opposed to classrooms. So we had a hundred students in a pod in like four sections and we had like closed circuit television. So like the kids would put on like a news show every morning and all the kids in the other pods would watch it. We had a planetarium, had like an Olympic-sized swimming pool, piano labs. It was just like, it was really wild. I had great teachers there, some of whom I stayed in touch with. most are passed away now. And then even in high school, I had really inspiring teachers. So I always…I always loved school. was never one of those kids that was like, I can't wait for a snow day kind of thing. Although I did like snow days, but you I did love school.
Richie
Yeah. That's so interesting that you just hearing that story, it's like, yeah, again, just the parallels between your childhood and mine. Like I'm thinking, yeah, I think I think I still know my first grade teacher, second grade teacher, like some of those early ones. And then, of course, the ones from high school that stood out to you, right? Like those are still top of mind. Yeah.
Michael
Yeah. It is amazing, right? Like 40 years later, gosh, for me almost 50 years later, I can still rattle off. I mean, it gets hazier for high school and I don't think I can name one college professor, but I can name almost every elementary school teacher. I can name the woman in charge of drama and art department and the plays I was in. I can remember that my fifth grade music teacher, Mr. Gominsky, suggested that when I told him I might quit the clarinet, he said to me, I think that's a good idea.
So like all these things, like those, it's just wild how you can, maybe it's because your brain is far less muddled with everything at that point and things are more impressionable. So they just stick there. I always like to use the analogy of like a computer hard drive and like those things are like down in the hard drive stored, you know? And then I find myself forgetting the passcode to my computer three times a week.
Richie
Yep.
Michael
Maybe I've used up all my hard drive.
Richie
We've got a system for that. Well, I'll tell it to you afterwards. So I got it. I got to ask, right? I hear I hear about your childhood and some of the influences and like the draw to education. What prompted you to start learn? And at that time, it wasn't even called learn, right? Well, tell us that. Tell us about that chapter.
Michael
Yeah, so you know, it was interesting. So as a result of like my, you I really loved English and so I decided to be a major in English in college. And it made my mom cry, cause she thought that I would never be able to earn a living, cause it wasn't like a practical thing. And then, I think it was after my sophomore year, I went to visit my sister who was in the Peace Corps in West Africa. And I spent like three weeks with her in a little village. And I became fascinated with oral history and just the oral historian, the griots of West Africa, because there's no written history.
So I decided I came back and I'm like, I'm going to major in anthropology and I'm going to write my thesis on West African oral history and griot history. And my mom cried again because she thought, what could be worse than anthropology than that?
So I, you know, and then I graduated and I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to like, go try to use my major some way. And luckily I was in Washington, DC. So I got an internship at the Smithsonian Institution in the office of Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies. And they did a lot of things. They put on a national sort of cultural festival on the mall every year and they featured a different, a different, a couple of different countries and different cultural traditions. And so that was very quasi educational. We would put out all sorts of informational and educational packets that we would send to school districts. And so that was sort of my entree. We also ran a record label called Folkways Records that had a lot of old spoken word and blues and jazz and folk music. And we would reissue it on a CD. We were like, we had all these educational packets for music education that we would sell into school districts. And so that was, I was sort of like, okay, I'm using my major. I really enjoy this.
Michael
And it was, guess around 98 or 99 that I got recruited to go work for this education startup, this internet startup. This is back, you know, for some listeners, like they were born after the internet. I remember when the internet like became commercial in 1993, really. But so in 99, I went to work for this startup and it was, the whole idea was it was gonna be sort of like a gated community online for educators-teachers, students, and parents. So teachers could post homework help. Students could go online and get homework help and chat with their teacher or with their classmates. Parents could go online and get their grades and other things like that. And that kind of catapulted me into the education industry, if you will. And then that company was sold to Sylvan Learning Systems, I think, in 2001, maybe.
And so, and when I went to work at Sylvan, I was in the institutional services division. So we were contracting with public school districts to provide intervention programs for struggling learners, mostly with Title I money. So I was working with school district administrators all around the country to design programs, either pull-in programs or afterschool programs with an academic component. And that's kind of really how I got into it. And then it wasn't until
Sylvan sort of sold our division that I kind of decided that, I think I can do what we did at Sylvan, but I think I can improve on that. One of the things that always bothered me about those intervention is they tended to be homogenous based on grade level as opposed to individualized. And so I connected with a guy I knew who was willing to kind of fund us building out an assessment system and purchasing and developing curriculum.
Michael
And then, you we went and got contracts with school districts and we grew really rapidly because we were focused on like individualized instruction that was really tailored to what the gaps were in students learning, all kind of tied to grade level in each particular state, as opposed to having a student in a small group learning what they already know, we could create individualized instruction in a very small group at different levels. And so everybody that was in that program was getting, it was a way to kind of accelerate tutoring in a very targeted way. And that's really how it began. And from there, we continued to expand and it wasn't until around 2010, 2011, we started to look at the needs that school districts had for special education programs. It started with a shortage of speech pathologists. And so we began to develop a program to do tele speech in a school setting. In fact, Laura Lazar, who's still with our organization, she recorded this how-to video based on a contract we had with a rural school district in Nevada on how to do effective tele speech in a school setting.
And I think it's still on the ASHA's American Speech and Hearing Association's website as an instructional video on how to best deliver, know, tell a speech in a school setting. Yeah. And then from there, it just grew and it was always a response to school districts needs and challenges. And so as more and more kids were getting diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, it was sort of like, hey, you know-
Richie
amazing.
Michael
-you do you have any interventions and, you know, what can we do? And we're like, well, you know, let's, you know, it was mostly very consultative and it kind of just grew from there really.
Richie
Yeah, yeah. And now across the nation, 17 states.
Michael
Yeah, well, if you count, you know, we have our, our, our autism division or our Learn Academy. I think if you count both, it's 24 states. 24 states. But yeah, it's, you know, it's sometimes I, it's, it's, it's kind of, mind numbing to think that, you know, but it didn't like sort of happen overnight, right? It was all through incremental steps and two steps forward and one step back, that kind of thing.
Richie
Okay, okay.
Michael
But it really is a matter of just kind of evolving and identifying where there's a need and where there's demand, and then trying to customize a way to kind of meet that demand.
Richie
So over the last, what you said in 2010 since then, right? The landscape of how individuals are getting support has really shifted, right? And now there's a lot of ABA services that are happening. We haven't been able to dive into that in our conversation just yet. So how have you seen the field of ABA shift in the last five, 10 years?
Michael
You know, it's crazy. It is like, it is absolute sea change. I think when we first started looking at kind of out of school interventions and ABA, call it like 2011, 2012, I think maybe four states covered the benefit. I don't think there was any Medicaid coverage for interventions with children on the autism spectrum. And then if you fast forward to today, all 50 states have reimbursement.
So they passed laws that were if a commercial insurance plan like Blue Cross Blue Shield or UnitedHealth or Op, if they wanna operate in that state, they must cover this benefit. That's a huge change. Parents used to have to come out of pocket if they could afford it. Very few could. A couple of states, California being one, Massachusetts another, were very progressive and had funded programs to health and human services departments, but it was limited, right? And so just the pure access to care has just ballooned.
And then the financial burden that most parents feel as a result of a diagnosis, that has been lessened pretty dramatically as well. that lobbying effort was pretty significant. And then in terms of along the way, state agencies, insurance plans, state Medicaid directors, all of them are kind of navigating along with us, to at least understand what this treatment is, how it's beneficial, how they should view it in terms of intensity. We've found over the years that, and you know this better than most, is like we find ourselves educating the health insurance rep or even people in the state offices.
Richie
Mm-hmm.
Michael
I spent a lot of time talking to politicians and legislators about the need, school district administrators, insurance representatives. I'm happy to say that 10 years later, the awareness is far stronger. And it's not obviously just us. I Autism Speaks has done a wonderful job building awareness. Almost every state has associations for ABA that promote awareness.
Richie
Yeah.
Michael
you know, there's a lot of recognition now. And that just wasn't the case, you know, say 10, 12 years ago.
Richie
Yeah, I think I think about myself and my social circle, right? Ten years ago it was, tell me about what you do. And now it's people bring questions to me, right? It's it's sort of shift, right? Instead of me trying to be an advocate and communicate on behalf of the community. Now people are saying I want to know more and I'm you know, they come to us, right? And so I think that's a that's a great thing that now-
Michael
Yeah.
Richie
-more and more exactly what you're saying. More and more people in the community, just a general population know about what it is that we are trying to do or other ABA companies or even just autism providers.Michael
Yeah, what's, I totally, and I think you're the one that, like, you know, it's a, like, you know, 10 years ago or eight years ago, if you told someone, like, if someone asked you what you do and you say, I'm a behavior technician or I'm a behavior analyst, people will be like, what's that? You know, and yeah, and now it, you know, if you're like, you know, on your plan, on your, you know, community softball team and you say, Hey, I'm a behavior technician. People know exactly what that is. You know.
Richie
What is that? Yeah.
Michael
And so I think that whole, like that awareness certainly has transformed, you know, access to care and things. And that's like a huge change from, you know, going back 10, 12 years.
Richie
So what do you think is coming in the next 10, 12 years?
Michael
gosh. You know, I couldn't pretend to have a crystal ball. You know, I do think that there, you know, we're kind of seeing it now where as, you know, the payer landscape starts to understand this treatment and the impact, I do think they're going to start to try to figure out what, you know, what constitutes good outcomes, just like in any other healthcare practice. And so I think that is going to kind of continue to evolve. I Think You know, as Pia always say, if you met one child with autism, you met one child with autism. I think the reason there's not like more defined outcomes frameworks currently is just because it is so unique and the interventions are so unique to each child and each family.
But I do think there'll be more of trying to identify what constitutes on a multi sort of a multi-measure, you know, because payers need to understand who's providing good treatment, who's getting their children to make progress. That's gonna be very important, especially as the amount of money being spent on these interventions continues to rise. And we've seen that in a handful of states where they're starting to say, wait a second, my reimbursement for this has gone up 400 % in the last three years. We need to figure out what are we getting for this additional spend? And then I think the other thing is there's a constant...
evolution of care, whether it be regulations, requirements, but also additional research studies and data, innovations in the delivery of care, automation in terms of some of the back office work that needs to be done to get an authorization and bill for services and track it. I think there'll continue to be innovation in that regard. And I think it's going to be interesting to see how it evolves. As I said, I can't really predict it, there will absolutely be, just like there is in the education sector with Sol Con's new Conmigo platform, which I heard a school in Arizona is going to start to implement. I think there's always going to be those innovations that go along.
Richie
Yeah.
Michael
But I don't think it'll ever replace the one-to-one treatment. There will be tools that behavior technicians and behavior analysts can use to improve their treatment, improve data analytics. But the one-to-one is so critical to care and development that I don't think that will change. But certainly, setting of care, tools that we use, all those things are continuing too
Richie
Yeah. And I think also there's going to be a shifting in the landscape of access, right? People are going to have different access in different places, right? Just based on where they live. Right. I think that's going to change. It's, it's, is interesting though. I'm hearing from you, the, history of the benefit of everything being individualized and your draw for things to be individualized and now how, how it's changing. And we've got to be able to measure some outcomes and be able to show that. And it's hard to do that when you've individualized and just noticing a trend of the past and the future.
Michael
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, if you think about like what you and I had talked about earlier, like, at least for me, like how impactful some individual teachers were, some individual coaches in my life and other, you know, mentors. And so I think like that is, I think so important in terms of human development is that like, you know, that human connection. But you're right. You know, you know, that's the, you know, that's the one, you know, challenge we have over the course of the next couple of years is to ensure that the agencies and the insurance companies that reimburse for our services don't attempt to kind of put it in a box.
We've seen this over the last several decades with the attempts to sort of standardize testing and evaluate the success or failure of a school or a particular teacher or classroom on a standardized test. That's one measurement, but there has to be multi-measurements. There has to be a holistic look at how this intervention is improving that family's life or that child's life and how they're meeting with successes and how they're changing and growing and evolving. It can't boiled down to one measurement or one test.
Richie
Right, right. Yeah, it has to be multimodality, right? Yeah.
Michael
Yeah, yeah, it really, and I mean, you know, it's, eventually there will be, you know, less funding available, right? Like there will be more people receiving services. And so it's going to be interesting to see how they, how the payers kind of prioritize this treatment. And so it is important to have these, these outcomes and this data. There have been a bunch of studies, obviously, that demonstrate the, the, the impact, but I think they have to kind of keep coming. And so, and I think that to some extent, that's our responsibility as providers, because I don't think the payers are going to kind of come up with it on their own, nor do we want them to, right? We want them to understand that there's a whole battery of indicators that can demonstrate whether or not a child is thriving.
Richie
Yeah, yeah. so Michael of all the things that you've done, what's been the most rewarding part of leading learn and leading the organization?
Michael
You know, to be honest, like there is a lot of reward, obviously, in seeing students and families and kiddos thrive and, you know, hearing about the stories of their successes and things, you know, and how they're making progress and building confidence. But, you know, also I find it very rewarding that we can create opportunities for talented professionals to come together and really pursue their passion for supporting young people and thrive as well.
You know, I always say, You know, view primarily my job as doing everything I can to provide the resources necessary for our talented clinicians and educators to do the work that they do. You know, and so I think to me, you know, building a network of professionals that can, you know, are able to do this work and able to collaborate and able to have an impact, you know, that's probably the most rewarding. And obviously the outgrowth of that is if you have very talented, caring individuals, you know, working every day with our most vulnerable population, you know, that feels really good, you know.
Richie
Yeah, yeah. Michael, I'm we're almost at the end of our time. This is flown by for me. Thank you for giving us the time to do this, but. No, this is great. I love it. I love it. But when you you mentioned over the next couple of years, right, there's there's some things coming. What's something that you're excited about? What's a change or an opportunity that you're excited about in the next few years?
Michael
I know I told you we talk a lot. I'm sorry. gosh. Well, I think there is, I think opportunities, and this is going to sound a little bit dull, for me, my lens is always trying to make the client experience better, but also our professional experience better for all of the clinicians and educators that work for us.
I do think that we're on maybe hopefully a precipice of improving the administrative workflows and just automating some things that are right now probably pretty tediously manual. And so that takes a lot of different forms, whether it be improvements in software to track data collection or improvements in software and practice management systems, scheduling.
Richie
Yeah.
Michael
you know, all of these things, you know, billing and collecting, a lot of the administrative work, you know, and some of this ties in with this outcomes that, you know, like you and Rob and your team are working on is that if we can kind of convince a payer that, you know, a value-based care, you know, kind of framework is best where we can, you know, essentially commit to a set of care, you know, regimen in a particular time period and then kind of commit to those outcomes that we expect. Think about the amount of administrative paperwork that that would reduce. So it's not like a super sexy answer, but I think everyone will attest to, regardless of whether or not you have a child that receives ABA, everybody goes to the doctor, everybody knows how confusing it is. I get bills for a visit.
Richie
Yeah. Hahaha
Michael
with a copay that I know I don't owe, but then you're like, maybe I should send it. Then you get a collection and then you're like, well, wait, what is this? And you know, it is very, very administratively burdensome even for like the end user. And so I do think a lot of the innovations that are happening in technology, I think can really, you know, make the client experience better and certainly make, you know, make our staff's lives better.
Richie
think those are challenges across the medical industry as a whole, right? I mean, how much time do doctors and specialists and nurses spend doing administrative tasks of taking notes and doing other things that impedes them being able to actually see patients and clients?
Michael
I just had, well, the reason I couldn't, like we were scheduled last week, I had a root canal and as I sat there after it was over, the endontist and his assistant were typing in and complaining out loud to me about all the notes that they had to submit to get reimbursed. So you're right, it's across the board, whether it's dental care, behavioral care, hospital visits. mean, it is a real challenge. It's one of these things where you, you know, and you get treatment ahead of payment. And that would seem very convenient, but at the same time, if there's no transparency in that, then you are surprised later or, you know, so it is one of those transactions due to the nature of the sort of urgency of the care most of the times where you can't stop if someone has an urgent situation and say, okay, well, let's cover all the possibilities, you know, and we're talking about. You know, human health and wellbeing. And so it's very complex, you know. I mean, if it weren't complex, it probably would have been solved already. But I do think with the aid of automation, it could certainly get easier.
Richie
Interesting, interesting. Well, thank you so much, Michael. Appreciate your time. Appreciate the work that you're doing. Appreciate you spearheading all these ventures into the future for us and for the autism community.
Michael
And I appreciate you and all autism talk. This is great. I'm honored to be on it. So, well, thanks so much.
Richie
Well, we're happy to have you back anytime.
All autism talk (allautismtalk.com) is sponsored by LEARN Behavioral (learnbehavioral.com).