Hoom House was founded in 2015 by Lauren and Bryce Nemer-Kaiser; a wife and husband team that married their talents, as well as each other, to build a business together. Lauren was working as a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) and Bryce was building technology startups.
At the time, there was a significant shortage of BCBAs to provide behavioral therapy services for individuals with an autism diagnosis. Lauren, like most providers at the time, often had to tell families that there was a waitlist for services and they could not immediately help the families that were asking for help. Those conversations were difficult for Lauren to have and left her discouraged about the state of her field.
Around that time, Bryce's young family member received an autism diagnosis. The family member was painstakingly dragged through confusing, paperwork heavy process controlled by insurance companies and medical providers. It was never clear what the next step was and months passed without any real services being provided to the family member. It became clear that even after all of the paperwork was complete, and authorization for services granted, their would still be a 2 year waitlist before the family member could start services.
This was the spark that started the fire for Lauren and Bryce.
Lauren and Bryce decided there had to be a better way to deliver services. There were obvious inefficiencies with current delivery models and disparities in geographic supply and demand. Providers lost efficiency to cancellations or rescheduling. Providers were not conveniently located for the majority of families that needed services so either families had to drive long distances to clinics or staff had to drive long distances to homes. The model was inconvenient, time intensive, and expensive. Those problems were universal, obvious, and seemingly easy to solve.
Lauren and Bryce turned to technology to solve those problems. They started by connecting families with providers virtually (text, email, video). If a family in Alaska needed services and there was a provider in Florida with availability, they should be able to find each other. Lauren and Bryce also pushed for a parent-centered model where providers focused on training parents to implement the techniques in their own home. Parents wanted to help their children, but traditional delivery models -- and insurance companies -- said only people with certain certifications could help. Lauren and Bryce wanted to empower parents.
They didn't intend to build a company; it was only a passion project to help a handful of families gain access to the services they needed and deserved. It was something to do "on the side" to help them reconcile the frustrations with field. However, within a few weeks of offering the new delivery model, so many families signed up and it became clear that this was more than Lauren and Bryce could handle in their spare time.
That was when the business was born.
Lauren and Bryce scaled up Hoom House to meet the demands of families. They aligned on a mission to make autism support services affordable and accessible for everyone who needs them. Flash forward to today and Hoom House accomplishes that by working directly with families, working with existing providers to move to a telepractice model, and training the next generation of providers with their clinical supervision program. Hoom House measures success by the number of people impacted by the existence of the company.
At the time of writing this, Hoom House can proudly say that over 120,000 individuals with autism have already experienced the impact or will experience the impact of the services delivered by Hoom House date.