Rethink First: Inspiring Hope, Powering Potential

Globally, 53.9 million children under five years experience a development disability, such as sensory impairment, intellectual disability, and autism spectrum disorders. Due to a shortage of trained clinicians, most of these children lack access to care. The role of caregivers, such as parents and other family members or guardians, raising a child or adolescents is critical in ensuring optimal child development outcomes.

It’s been proven that early intervention results in fewer behavioral problems during childhood and adolescence and improved emotional and social competence. In this scenario, the empowerment of caregivers is increasingly important as a critical component of care interventions for children with developmental disorders. Caring for a child with a developmental disability can be challenging, and these caregivers more frequently report experiencing a range of mental health issues. Caregiver skills training becomes crucial in this context.

One such company which inspires and empowers individuals with developmental disabilities and their caregivers is Rethink First, a leading health technology company co-founded by Daniel Etra and Eran Rosenthal in 2007. Under the leadership and guidance of CEO Daniel Etra, Rethink First provides cloud-based treatment tools, training, and clinical supports for individuals with developmental disabilities and their caregivers as well as a range of mental health supports for the broader population.

Rethink’s journey began in 2007 with a mission to address the significant challenge of effectively and affordably meeting the treatment needs of this enormous and growing population worldwide with a considerable shortage of trained professionals. The Company determined that leveraging technology to teach caregivers how to provide the treatment was the only way to deliver the best clinical practice treatment – in a scalable way.

This would impact all entities revolving around the care of such people, including in school, home, and the healthcare system.Today, Rethink provides a broad range of research-based teaching strategies grounded in the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). The award-winning Rethink program includes a comprehensive online individualized treatment program with thousands of video-based demonstrations – developed by internationally-recognized experts in the field – to train caregivers, parents, professional and paraprofessional staff to manage problem behaviors and teach an individual with developmental disability critical skills. Automated data-based reports track progress in real-time, facilitate coordination across care team members, and provide robust data analytics on outcomes. Additionally, Program Specialists can also utilize Rethink as a form of job-embedded professional development and augment coaching caregivers and other support staff.

Rethink also offers a range of technology-enabled remote service options, like short-term web-based consultations with Rethink’s Board-certified behavioral the rapists to ongoing program development initiatives supported by an in-house team of clinicians. In addition, Rethink’s practice management offering allows for the tracking of service authorizations and cost of treatment as it relates to clinical outcomes. Rethink serves individuals at all levels of development and ages, from the point of diagnosis through early adulthood.

“Innovation to us means recognizing the problem in the market that we are seeking to address and genuinely understanding the customer’s needs before developing unique and scalable solutions to address those needs. In our case, the problem we are solving is the exploding population with a developmental disability and a severe shortage of trained clinicians available to serve them,” explained Daniel Etra, Co-founder and CEO of Rethink First. “In addition, the Rethink platform, while robust and best-practice, is both web-based and incredibly easy to use, driving scale and rapid adoption.”

One of the emerging trends in healthcare technology today is Big Data and AI, which are being used to provide medical professionals valuable insights into how best to treat their patients. Nowadays, outcomes of interventions among individuals with developmental disabilities cannot be accurately predicted. But Rethink is helping address this issue by gathering the most extensive data set of outcomes associated with this population. This data set can one day be used to develop the correct treatment protocols and facilitate the predictability of outcomes.

Road Ahead

Research suggests that people who care for a dependent with a developmental disability have twice the rate of anxiety and depression. It can cost them thousands of dollars annually in lost productivity. Over half of such caregivers work fewer hours or leave the workforce to accommodate their child’s needs. The Rethink program helps support these employees, directly impacting their productivity in the workplace, and helps employers create a culture of wellness for their entire workforce.

Rethink’s clients today range from employers with under 1000 employees to over 500,000 employees, and across its book of business, Rethink covers over 7 million lives. The Company also offers an industry-leading special needs management platform for public school districts. Serving students with special needs and those requiring behavior support, the Rethink program is used by hundreds of districts in all 50 states, ranging from large urban systems down to small rural districts.

The Rethink program allows districts to fully meet Federal IDEA requirements and various state-based legislative mandates to provide an adequate education to students with special needs. The program also helps districts train staff and accurately measure the progress of a student population not subject to mainstream standardized testing. District clients have reported superior student outcomes and significant cost savings in mitigating the need for out-of-district placements that can run up to $100,000 per year per student for private programs.

“We have expanded our core product offering beyond treatment tools and supports for dependents with a developmental disability and their caregivers to adults with a developmental disability, including supporting those individuals with a Neuro-diverse condition in the workplace,” concluded Daniel Etra, Co-founder and CEO.

About the Leader

Daniel Etra, Co-founder and CEO

With almost three decades of successful international business experience, including 20 years as a serial entrepreneur, Daniel was Co-Founder & CEO of RER International, a global supplier of printed materials to the retail industry. He was a Consultant at Bain & Company, helping establish their NY office, and served as a Managing Director of Promodex Ltd., an importer and distributor of consumer appliances and industrial equipment in the Middle East. In addition, he served in the Israel Defense Forces and worked at Wasserstein, Perella & Co., specializing in M&A in healthcare, technology, and natural resources.

Daniel has won numerous awards, including the Inc. 500, the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, the Smart CEO Future 50, and CEO of the Year from Industry Era and Corporate Vision Magazines. He is also a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), has a BA from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School Born and raised in New York City, he is active in various children’s causes and volunteers with organizations such as NY Cares and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

“Rethink serves individuals at all levels of development and ages, from the point of diagnosis through early adulthood.”