Coexistence
Your practice management system is not failing at this. It was never asked to do it.
Clinics running CentralReach, Motivity, Theralytics or Rethink usually have their clinical and billing record in good order, and still have parent communication happening in a group text.
That is not a gap in the product they bought. It is a different job, with different timing, a different audience and a different tolerance for effort.
These vendors are not the problem, and we are not going to pretend they are.
The major ABA practice management systems state plainly that they act as business associates: CentralReach on its responsibilities under HIPAA, Motivity by incorporating a Business Associate Agreement into its terms of service, Theralytics by stating it operates as a HIPAA Business Associate and executes BAAs as required. All three are quoted and linked at the foot of this page. If you are looking for a compliance gap, it is almost never here — it is in the messaging channel nobody procured.
Why daily parent communication is a separate job.
Not a missing feature. Four structural differences, any one of which would be enough on its own.
The audience is a parent, not a payer or a clinician.
A practice management system exists to produce a defensible clinical and billing record. Its outputs are correct, structured and written for people who read clinical documents. A parent at 5pm needs three sentences in plain language, and reformatting a session note into that is a separate act of writing, not an export.
The unit is a day, not a session or a claim.
Billing is organised around a session with a start, an end and a code. Parents experience a day: three technicians, a lunch, one hard transition and a good afternoon. Nothing in the billing model spans that, because it never needed to.
The timing is during the shift, not after it.
Session notes are written at the end, often after the child has gone home. The handoff needs information the moment it exists, and the parent needs it at pick-up. A record completed at 6pm cannot serve either, however good it is.
The cost of an entry has to be near zero.
A clinical system can reasonably ask for structured, careful data entry, because the record has to withstand an audit. A communication tool competes with a text message. If logging takes longer than sending a text, staff send the text, and you are back to personal phones.
What running alongside actually means.
The word gets used loosely by vendors who mean 'we will eventually replace this'. Here is the specific version.
It never touches a claim.
Cliqit is not an EHR and not a practice management system. It does not collect trial-by-trial data, does not generate session notes for billing, and has no route into your revenue cycle. Nothing about your existing setup has to change for it to run.
It does not need an integration to be useful.
This is worth being blunt about, because "integrates with" is usually where these evaluations stall for a quarter. The daily communication layer does not depend on reading your clinical data — it depends on what staff observe during the shift, which is not in the other system anyway.
It is the same record twice, not two records.
The entries staff tap during the day carry the child, the technician and the time. Those entries keep the handoff current while the day runs, and assemble into the parent summary at pick-up. One act of logging, two outputs, neither one retyped.
Your clinical system stays the source of truth.
Goals, programmes, trial data and anything a BCBA writes belong where they already are. A communication tool that starts reaching for clinical data collection becomes something technicians need training on, and a tool that needs training does not get used on a hard day.
Keep what you have. Add the layer it never had.
Staff tap a child, tap what happened, and pick the detail from a list. Nothing is typed and nothing is exported from your clinical system. Parents only ever reach their own child, and the practice keeps the record when someone leaves.
For the CentralReach-specific version of this question, including what CareCompanion covers, see does CentralReach have a parent communication app.
Questions clinics ask about this.
Does CentralReach already do parent communication?
CentralReach offers CareCompanion, which is oriented around caregiver training and engagement rather than a daily update from the floor. It is a real product and worth evaluating on its own terms. The gap most clinics describe is the day-to-day layer: what happened today, logged during the shift by whoever had the child, in language a parent can use tonight. We go through that distinction on the CentralReach page.
Do we need an integration between Cliqit and our practice management system?
No, and it is worth understanding why not. The information a parent update needs is what staff observed during the shift, which does not live in your billing or clinical system while the day is still running. There is nothing to read across. Avoiding the integration is what lets a clinic start in a week rather than after a procurement cycle.
Is our practice management system HIPAA compliant?
The major ABA systems say so themselves and act as business associates. CentralReach states it complies with its responsibilities under HIPAA; Motivity incorporates a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement into its terms of service; Theralytics states it operates as a HIPAA Business Associate and executes BAAs with customers as required. Those vendors are generally not where a clinic’s exposure sits. The exposure is in the parent messaging that happens outside them.
Then where is the actual compliance gap?
In the channel nobody procured. Clinics with a fully compliant practice management system routinely have parent communication running through a classroom app, a group text or technicians’ personal phones, because the clinical system never offered a fast way to tell a parent about their afternoon. That gap is invisible on a vendor security review, because the vendor involved was never reviewed.
We are mid-migration between practice management systems. Should we wait?
Usually the opposite. A communication layer that does not depend on the clinical system is one of the few things that can stay stable while the system underneath it changes, and staff keep one habit through the migration. It is also the period when parents are most likely to notice things slipping.
Our sites run different practice management systems after an acquisition. Does that matter?
Not for this. Because the communication layer does not integrate with the clinical system, sites on different platforms can share one parent channel, one access model and one BAA. For groups that grew by acquisition this is often the fastest available consolidation, and it is covered on the multi-location page.
Related
Sources
Every claim about another product on this page is a quote from that product’s own documentation, linked below with the date we last read it there. Vendors revise these pages. If you find one of these out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
- [1] CentralReach — Security · checked August 26, 2026
- [2] Motivity — HIPAA Business Associate Agreement · checked August 26, 2026
- [3] Theralytics — Security · checked August 26, 2026
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