CHOP launches Philly-area autism therapy network in partnership with Soar Autism Centers

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Denver-based Soar Autism Centers have opened in Newtown the first of five planned early childhood autism centers in the Philadelphia region and expect the network could grow to more than 30 centers, officials said.

The 50-50 joint venture is designed to reduce wait times for therapy and to make it make it easier for families to access multiple types of therapy at one location while remaining connected to CHOP specialists.

“It can take a year to get into therapy on a regular basis,“ an extremely long time in a young child’s neurological development, Soar cofounder and CEO Ian Goldstein said.

Such wait times continue to frustrate families despite dramatic growth in the autism-services sector over the last 15 years or so, as states mandated insurance coverage and diagnosis rates soared with more awareness and an expanded definition of autism.

Nationally, applied behavioral analysis, commonly known as ABA therapy, has become popular for autism treatment, increasing nationally by 270% between 2019 and 2024, according to Trilliant Health, a Nashville data analysis firm. The volume of services provided locally — where companies including ABA Centers, Helping Hands Family, and Neurabilities Healthcare have expanded — was not available.

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The increase in diagnoses has outpaced the growth in available services, said Matthew Lerner, an autism expert at Drexel University, who is not involved with the newly launched CHOP-Soar Autism Centers.

When Lerner moved to the Philadelphia region from Long Island in 2023 and started getting plugged into the autism network, a few clinicians here would ask if he could connect patients with services in New York.

“I was coming from eastern Long Island, two hours east of New York City, and people were like, do you know anyone closer to you?” he recalled.

CHOP, among the largest children’s health systems in the country, has long been concerned about limited access to autism care in the region, said Steve Docimo, CHOP’s executive vice president for business development and strategy.

The nonprofit has provided diagnostic services, but not the forms of therapy that the CHOP-Soar centers will offer. “The threshold to doing this on our own has always been high enough that it hasn’t been a pool that we’ve jumped in,” he said.

CHOP was in talks with Soar for three years before agreeing to the 50-50 joint venture with the for-profit company. CHOP’s investment will be its share of the startup costs for CHOP-Soar locations.

The partnership plan calls for five locations in the first two years. The partners did not say where the next four centers will be.

Soar has 15 locations in the Denver area, which has about half the population of the Philadelphia region, Goldstein said.

That comparison implies that CHOP-Soar partnership could grow to 30 centers, Goldstein added. He thinks the region’s needs could support additional expansion, saying the total could reach “into the dozens.”

That’s assuming CHOP-Soar provides high quality care for kids, an appealing family experience, and a system of coordinated care: “There will be a need to do more than five, and I think we’re jointly motivated to do so,” Goldstein said.

Families seeking care for an autistic child typically have to go to different places to get all the types of therapy they need.

Families “get behavioral analytics in one place, occupational therapy somewhere else, and speech language pathology in another place,” Docimo said.

Soar brings all of that together in one center. “If it can be scaled, this will fill a gap in our region in a way that I think will work very well for these families,” he said.

CHOP-Soar centers will emphasize early intervention and treat children through age six. “The brain has its greatest neuroplasticity” up to age 3, “so waiting a year is a really big deal,” Goldstein said. “You’re missing out on that opportunity to really influence the child’s developmental trajectory at a young age.”

Some autism services providers focus on ABA therapy, which breaks social and self-care skills, for example, down into a components and then works discretely on each.

But Soar offers what Goldstein described as “integrated, coordinated care for the child.” That includes speech, occupational, and behavioral therapies.

With CHOP, medical specialties, such as genetics, neurology, and gastrointestinal care, can be tied in as well, Goldstein said.

It’s rare for autism providers to offer a wide variety of commonly needed services under one roof, said Lerner, who leads the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute’s Life Course Outcomes Research Program.

He said Soar’s evidence-based, multidisciplinary approach has a lot to offer the region.

“A person diagnosed with autism will have complex care needs throughout their life, and a one-size-fits-all, one-intervention approach will not work,” he said.