Leading autism service organizations join founding consortium to help shape the future of longitudinal developmental measurement
PLYMOUTH, MN — July 28, 2026 — EarliPoint Health today announced the launch of Project ALIGN (Autism Longitudinal Insights and Growth Network), a first-of-its-kind consortium of leading autism service providers committed to advancing the use of objective developmental measurement throughout the autism care journey.
Project ALIGN brings together clinical and executive leaders from some of the nation’s most respected autism service organizations to collaborate on best practices for implementing longitudinal developmental measurement, improving clinical decision-making, strengthening communication with families, informing payer discussions, and advancing evidence-based autism care.
Project ALIGN Founding Members include:
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Dennis Dixon, Ph.D. — Chief Clinical Officer, 360 Behavioral Health
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Jana Sarno, M.A., BCBA — Chief Clinical Officer, Hopebridge
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Hanna Rue, Ph.D., BCBA-D — Chief Clinical Officer, LEARN Behavioral
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Michael Morley — Vice President of Payer Relations, BlueSprig Pediatrics
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Jeanine Weichelt, M.Ed., BCBA — Chief Operating Officer, Helping Hands Family
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Katie Meyer, M.A. — Vice President of Clinical Operations, Lighthouse Autism Center
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Sharyn Kerr, Ph.D., MBA, BCBA-D — Chief Executive Officer, Spectrum of Hope
Collectively, the founding members represent thousands of clinicians serving children with autism across the United States and bring decades of combined expertise in clinical care, operations, research, and innovation.
Project ALIGN was established on the belief that objective developmental measurement should become a foundational component of autism care not only at the time of diagnosis, but throughout treatment to better understand developmental progress and improve outcomes for children and families.
“As healthcare continues its shift toward quality and value-based care, autism providers will increasingly need objective ways to measure developmental progress and demonstrate the impact of the services they provide,” said Jamie Pagliaro, President and Chief Executive Officer of EarliPoint Health. “Project ALIGN is about bringing together leaders who are willing to help shape that future. Together, we have an opportunity to establish practical frameworks, share implementation insights, and define how objective developmental measurement can strengthen clinical care, improve communication with families, and demonstrate value to payers.”
Throughout the year, Project ALIGN members will meet regularly to exchange implementation experiences, identify best practices, provide strategic feedback on emerging measurement approaches, and explore how objective developmental data can better support treatment planning, parent engagement, quality improvement, and payer partnerships.
“The autism service field has needed an objective and easy to implement assessment for the core symptoms of autism for a very long time,” said Dennis Dixon, Ph.D., Chief Clinical Officer of 360 Behavioral Health. “This is why I encourage others to adopt EarliPoint. If the assessment becomes ubiquitous, then the service system will start to self-organize around the outcomes. We can backwards engineer our approaches to achieve those outcomes.”
“Hopebridge is proud to join Project ALIGN as a Founding Member,” said LeAnne Hester, Chief Executive Officer of Hopebridge. “Families want meaningful information about their child’s progress, and providers need objective ways to understand and communicate developmental change over time. By pairing objective developmental data with the expertise of our clinicians, we can strengthen conversations with families and continue advancing high-quality, evidence-based care for the children we serve.”
EarliPoint’s FDA-cleared eye-tracking technology provides objective measures of social disability, verbal ability, and non-verbal cognition, allowing clinicians to complement traditional clinical judgment with standardized developmental measurement. Through Project ALIGN, participating organizations will explore how these objective insights can be integrated into routine clinical workflows and leveraged to improve care delivery while helping establish the next generation of outcomes measurement in autism services.
Project ALIGN reflects EarliPoint Health’s ongoing commitment to advancing the science of autism assessment and partnering with providers to create a more transparent, measurable, and outcomes-focused future for autism care.
About EarliPoint Health
EarliPoint Health is transforming autism care through objective developmental measurement. Its FDA-cleared eye-tracking technology is indicated as a tool to aid qualified clinicians in the diagnosis and assessment of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in children ages 16 months through 95 months (7 years), who are at risk based on concerns identified by a parent, caregiver, or healthcare provider. Built on more than two decades of research, EarliPoint’s technology has been validated in large prospective clinical studies and is helping providers, families, and payers better understand developmental progress across the autism care journey.
