In 2011, a small Bay Area nonprofit served about 500 people with developmental disabilities. Fifteen years later, it's Catalight, one of the largest nonprofit behavioral health networks in the country, supporting more than 24,000 families a year across a roughly 16,000-practitioner network. Susan Armiger led that transformation, on a contrarian bet about how the field measures success.
Most of autism care is still paid and organized around volume, the number of ABA hours delivered. Armiger built Catalight around the opposite premise: value-based care, where a provider is rewarded for outcomes and wellbeing rather than billable hours. The model is still rare in behavioral health, and Catalight is among the few organizations operating under a value-based contract.
She has pushed that logic into the clinical core. In 2024, Catalight released practice guidelines challenging the "dosage effect," the long-held assumption that more hours of ABA necessarily produce better outcomes, and elevated parent-mediated intervention, where caregivers are trained to deliver strategies themselves. The review committee deliberately included autistic self-advocates and parents, not only clinicians.
The access numbers are what she points to. Against autism-evaluation waits that run a year or more in much of the country, Catalight says it delivers a diagnostic assessment and a path to treatment within 10 days of referral in 93% of cases, partly by training its own postdoctoral evaluators rather than competing for the existing pool.
Her latest move reaches past Catalight's own network. In May, the organization helped launch the National Society of Autism Professionals, led by psychologist Robin McLeod, PhD, LP, a cross-disciplinary association meant to unify a fragmented field around shared standards and outcome measures, the scaffolding a value-based model needs and no single provider can build alone. Whether the rest of the industry follows is the open question. Armiger has spent 15 years betting it will.
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