Adam Dreyfus is a behavior analyst running a large center for kids with autism: The Sarah Dooley Center in Richmond VA. How did get from there to Googling “How to start a business” in a Starbucks, to working in a high tech start up that connects parents with answers and services from Board Certified Behavior Analysts? Listen to this inspiring interview with RyanO in which Adam shares the story of how his dream came to be and how he and his partners created the company AnswersNow. Learn how they created a way to leverage expert knowledge and transfer it to lay people using technology. Something that could just as easily apply in the animal training world.
“Our field, in my opinion has not done a very good job of standing parents up as partners. Way back in the 70s, we demonstrated, hey this stuff can work, and a key piece is parent involvement, and if anything we’ve drifted away from that, we’re in hyper specialized clinics, we’re in home stuff where the parents don’t even know what’s going on out there. And so this is super frustrating for us. I’ve got 89 kids in my school. And my parents in my school, top flight ABA school are like, ‘I have no idea how you guys do what you do’. So this is all about reducing the barrier of entry to this knowledge, and it is literally transfer of expert knowledge through technology.”
Adam’s Advice to People Wanting the Change the World
“Dare to dream, man”. There’s a path mapped out for creating a start-up and anyone can follow that path.
Adam Talks to RyanO
Listen to this informal chat with Adam and Ryan to hear about how Adam got to where he’s at, what’s new and what he’ll be talking about at CHATTcon 2019.
Adam’s CHATTcon Sneak Peek
Cracking the Parent Training Code: Leveraging technology to reach parents in a new way
“I’m gonna unpack in detail, sort of the guts behind AnswersNow. We’re gonna walk through what we’ve learned so far on how we use engagement. We’ve got a platform that tracks engagement really, really tightly, and when you see the data, like when people drop off, and why do they drop off, and what is stopping them, we’ve got a bunch of people who never respond. They sign up, they go through all the stuff and they’re in the room and they never say anything, so how do we challenge that? And then I’m also gonna preview the algorithm builder that we’ve got, and show how we build out the decision tree algorithms and how we build out the automation that is not commercially available yet, but it’s certainly part of the future.”
Adam will talk about how this technology and the use of data collected is applicable to any type of expert knowledge transfer using technology.
Adam Bio
Adam is the Chief Science Officer and a co-founder of AnswersNow, an innovative mobile app that connects parents of children diagnosed with autism with their own clinician. AnswersNow was born out of the need to better support parents and reduce the barrier of entry for parents to expert advice. He also serves ad the Senior Director at the Sarah Dooley Center for Autism at St. Joseph’s Villa. He came to the Villa after serving the Commonwealth of Virginia as a Technical Assistance Associate at VCU’s Autism Center for Excellence. Adam worked in Region 1 and 8 providing direct services to school divisions, primarily working with Henrico County Public Schools as well as Greensville County Public Schools. He earned his Master’s degree in Special Education/Applied Behavior Analysis from Columbia University’s Teachers College. He studied Verbal Behavior Analysis under Dr. Douglas Greer and was trained in the CABAS system.
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