Updated
The best one fixes the step where your families get lost, so pull 60 days of inquiries and mark where each family stopped. Families who never reach a person need 24/7 answering on every channel; families who stall on documents need guided digital intake with follow-up. Test any tool on a slice of real traffic for two weeks before you buy.
When an ABA owner asks for "the best intake software," they usually mean one of four different kinds of product, and the best choice depends on where families are getting lost. A practice that loses families at the first phone call needs something different from one that loses them waiting on the diagnostic report.
So this guide doesn’t rank vendors. It explains the four categories, what each one actually does, the questions that separate a demo from a working system, and a two-week test to run before you sign. Carelu is one of these tools, and its pitch is at the end. The method works whatever you buy.
ABA intake has six steps: the family reaches out, someone answers, you qualify them (area, payer, age, diagnosis status), they complete documents, benefits are verified, and a first session is scheduled. Industry drop-off between first inquiry and first appointment commonly runs 40–85%, and almost every practice has one or two steps that cause most of it.
Before any demo, pull the last 60 days of inquiries and mark where each family stopped. If most never reached a person, you have an answering problem. If most qualified but never sent documents, you have a completion problem. If most were verified and still didn’t start, you have a scheduling or staffing problem that no intake software will fix. Buy for the step that is losing the most families.
The intake or "lead" feature built into the system you already use for scheduling, clinical data and billing. Strong: one record from inquiry to claim, no integration. Weak: it’s a form and a status list. It stores families but doesn’t answer them, chase them or verify them, and families have to come to it.
Sales CRMs adapted for intake. Strong: pipelines, task queues, email and text sequences, reporting. Weak: they are built for sales, not care. HIPAA coverage depends on the plan and the BAA, payer and diagnosis rules must be built by hand, and someone still has to have every conversation.
People who answer the phone when you can’t. Strong: a human voice at 10pm. Weak: most take a message rather than doing intake, cover only the phone and not chat, text or forms, and hand you a list to call back in the morning, when the family may already have booked elsewhere.
Software that has the intake conversation itself on phone, chat, text and forms, qualifies, collects documents and verifies benefits, then hands the case to your team. Strong: covers all channels, 24/7, and finishes the work instead of logging it. Weak: quality varies widely, and a bad one frustrates families. Test it hard (see the two-week test below).
A demo shows the happy path. These questions show what happens to a real family on a real Tuesday night.
In our research, 48% of family contacts arrive outside business hours. "It goes to voicemail" and "we send an email" are not coverage.
Families use whichever is closest. A tool that covers only one channel leaves the others to your staff.
Ask to see it turn away a family outside your area politely, and route a family with no diagnosis to an evaluation path. 22% of families reach out before a diagnosis.
Diagnosis requirements, referral orders and prior-auth rules differ by state and plan. Someone has to maintain them.
During intake, or as a task for staff later? What does it check: eligibility only, or ABA coverage and network status too?
Portal login, email attachment, text photo, on-form upload? Every login you add costs you completions.
Most parents will do this in a pediatrician’s waiting room, not at a desk.
You want each signed document as a PDF in the family’s record, not a checkbox in a database.
Only 2% of providers in our research run any automated re-engagement. Ask what message a family gets on day 1, 3 and 7 when their diagnosis report is missing.
In our research, 40% of captured website leads were job seekers. They distort every metric unless they’re filtered.
Ask for the exact fields that sync, in which direction, and how often.
A signed BAA is the minimum. Ask for the SOC 2 report, not a badge.
Don’t decide from a demo. Run the tool on a slice of real traffic, such as one location, one channel or after-hours only, for two weeks, and compare it against the same slice from the previous two weeks.
Measure four things: the share of inquiries answered within five minutes, the share that complete qualification, the share that submit documents, and the median time from first contact to verified. If the tool doesn’t move the step you bought it for, it doesn’t matter how good the demo was. Also call it yourself, pretending to be a stressed parent with a vague question and the wrong insurance card. That tells you more than any feature list.
The alternative to intake software is usually a coordinator and a shared inbox, and that setup has a cost that doesn’t show up on an invoice: every family who reached voicemail, waited overnight for a callback, or never sent the diagnosis report. Our free intake leak calculator (linked below) turns your monthly inquiry count into a dollar figure for that.
It depends on where your families get lost. If they never reach a person, you need something that answers every channel 24/7. If they qualify but never finish documents, you need guided digital intake and follow-up. If you only need a record from inquiry to claim, the intake module in your practice-management system may be enough. Pull 60 days of inquiries, find the step losing the most families, and buy for that step.
A CRM tracks families and can send sequences, but it doesn’t have the conversation, qualify against payer rules, collect documents or verify benefits. Someone still does that work by hand. Check the HIPAA coverage and BAA on the specific plan before storing family data.
An answering service puts a person on the phone after hours but usually takes a message. AI intake completes the intake across phone, chat, text and forms and verifies benefits, then hands your team a finished case. Test either on after-hours traffic for two weeks and compare the share of families who reach the documents step.
Compare the price to the value of the families it recovers, not to the cost of a coordinator. One additional started client a month usually covers most intake tools many times over. Our intake leak calculator estimates that figure from your own volume.
Yes. Intake collects protected health information: diagnosis, insurance and the child’s details. The vendor must sign a BAA, and you should ask for their SOC 2 report.
Carelu is the fourth kind of tool on this list, built only for ABA and behavioral-health intake. It has the intake conversation itself, on every channel and at any hour, and hands your coordinators families who are qualified, documented and verified. It works alongside your practice-management system and CRM rather than replacing them.
Your team still decides who to admit, schedules the assessment and builds the trust only people can build. Carelu does the repetitive work before that.
Phone (an AI voice agent), website chat, text and web forms are answered in seconds, including the 48% of contacts that arrive outside business hours.
Service area, payer, age and diagnosis status are checked on the spot. Families outside your area are turned away kindly, and families without a diagnosis get your evaluation path.
A phone-friendly intake prefilled from the conversation, e-signed consents with a PDF for every signed document, uploads by text, resume where they left off, and follow-up until the packet is complete.
Eligibility, ABA coverage, network status and referral requirements are checked during intake, with each state’s payer rules built in.
Routing by location or state, job seekers separated from families, and integrations with CentralReach, Rethink, Aloha, Salesforce, HubSpot and more. HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 Type II, BAA signed.
How each category handles the six steps, and where Carelu sits.
Test it on your own after-hours traffic.
See Carelu handle a live ABA intake end to end: answered, qualified, documented and verified, then run it on a slice of your own traffic.
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