What We Heard, Saw, and Learned at BABAT 2025

The BABAT 2025 Annual Conference took over the DCU Center in Worcester, Massachusetts for three packed days this October. People weren't just arriving, they were arriving with intention. Lanyards, laptops, coffee, side-conversations in the hallway… all the familiar signs that this wasn't going to be a quiet conference.

What stood out within the first hour was how quickly everyone fell into the kinds of conversations that don't usually happen outside this field. You could overhear strangers comparing supervision struggles, joking about documentation fatigue, swapping ideas about goal-tracking, and debating what "meaningful progress" should look like. It didn't feel like marketing or positioning. It sounded like people trying to do their jobs better and wanting others to do the same.

The Topics That Hit Closer Than Expected

Across the three days, certain themes kept resurfacing:

Data is only useful if it actually changes decisions.
People weren't impressed by "more graphs." They were hungry for data that tells them what to do next, how to modify, when to pivot, how to defend decisions.

Therapists are drowning in admin.
Everyone was buried under paperwork, scheduling, onboarding, billing, authorizations, and audits which was stealing their irreplaceable hours. If someone could give back time, they would be solving more than a workflow issue.

Behavior analysis is becoming more integrated.
ABA wasn't discussed in isolation. The borders around Speech, OT, schools, mental health, and EI are thinner now, and the tools need to follow that reality instead of fighting it.

People are tired… but still deeply invested.
There was exhaustion, yes but not apathy. The rooms were full. The questions were sharp. The stakes felt personal.

Real Conversations at the Booth

The booth became a magnet for the kinds of people who live inside the problems they're trying to solve.

• There were directors asking how to unify multi-site practices without losing visibility.
• There were clinicians leaning over the demo screens, pointing to workflow bottlenecks they know by muscle memory.
• There were new professionals looking for something that doesn't make them learn five systems before they learn good practice.

The most common reaction wasn't excitement, it was relief.
The kind that sounds like: "Wait… everything here is actually in one place?"

You could see shoulders drop when they realized they didn't have to choose between compliance and sanity.

Where S Cubed Fits in All of This

One thing that kept echoing through the conference, not in slides but in the way people spoke, is that the days of running each therapy discipline in its own software are ending. Clinics aren't ABA-only anymore. Schools aren't speech-only. Real cases don't come in silos, so the systems can't either.

That is the gap S Cubed was built for from the very beginning, not as an ABA system that later tried to make room for speech or OT, but as a platform designed to hold the reality that multiple disciplines often serve the same child, the same family, the same school team. The goal was never to make one more tool; it was to replace the stack of tools people were tolerating.

Hearing people at BABAT describe the friction they live with made it clear that the problem isn't that clinicians don't care about process, it's that the process has never been designed for how the work actually happens. If anything, the conference made the original design philosophy behind S Cubed feel even more justified: build one place where the work naturally intersects instead of forcing people to stitch their day together manually.

What Stayed With Us

Leaving the conference, the takeaway wasn't about who presented what. It was the reminder that the people doing this work are carrying enough weight already and anything built for them should lighten it, not add to it.

BABAT made one truth feel obvious: This community shows up fully for their clients, families, and peers. The tools that support them should show up with the same seriousness.

Ready to See What "Lighter" Can Look Like?

Before leaving Worcester, a lot of people said some version of the same thing: "I just want the work to feel doable again."

That is exactly the problem S Cubed was built to reduce, not with another dashboard, not with another login, but by replacing the pile of systems that make the day heavier than it needs to be.

If you're curious what it looks like when the admin weight drops and the clinical work is allowed to be the focus again, you can take a look at what S Cubed has to offer.