When Syed Mohammed founded Enable My Child, he hoped to fill in the gaps left by school systems that meant that children could not always access the mental health and learning resources they needed. But with the coronavirus pandemic moving education to the home, more and more students find themselves without that care. Enable My Child offers accessible, affordable, at-home care to ensure that children can keep learning.
Hayat interviewed Mohammed about his company, and how he is adapting to these new changes.
What inspired you to found Enable My Child?
I had undiagnosed ADHD as a child, so I struggled to keep up with the other kids in my classes. My parents and teachers believed I just had trouble learning, so I didn’t receive a diagnosis or proper treatment until I reached my thirties. After talking about my experiences with a friend who is a therapist, she suggested I reach out to someone and try to find the root of my difficulties. Eventually, I was diagnosed with ADHD among other conditions and started to receive treatment. It was a transformational experience. I began to see a major difference in the ease with which I was able to complete tasks that used to require more time and effort.
However, it wasn’t until a few years later that I felt compelled to found Enable My Child. I had a chance meeting with a pediatrician in an airport, and he told me that only about 40% of children with a diagnosable condition get access to quality care. This revelation made me think about how receiving care earlier in life would have helped me tremendously. I wondered if others felt this way, so I surveyed over 150 parents of children with various disorders and recruited a team of experienced pediatric care professionals who spent almost two years researching the barriers to therapy and seeking solutions. We realized we had several problems to solve, including improving access, engaging pediatric therapists, reducing the wait time for evaluations and treatment, and making care more affordable. We founded Enable My Child to overcome those obstacles and more.
How has Enable My Child adapted to the increased demand with COVID-19?
The pandemic has been a really valuable learning experience for our company as well as our clients, many of which are schools and early intervention centers. After schools across the country transitioned to remote learning, there was a significant surge in inquiries for our teletherapy platform. Schools were the biggest contributors to the surge, but we also received interest from early intervention (EI) centers and private therapy practices in need of virtual therapy solutions. In addition to a surge in new interest, we experienced an 8-10x spike in demand from existing customers within a few days of the school closings.
After experiencing so much demand, we knew that we had to help schools and therapists make the transition to virtual therapy, so we offered our teletherapy platform for free to the end of the school year.
We realize the impact of the pandemic will continue to linger, so we’re working on a new business model that will enable us to provide schools and EI centers the same quality services they’ve been providing at a lower price point. While our prices are already among the lowest offered by therapy providers, this new model will allow schools to provide care to their students in a more cost-efficient way. They will be able to divert less funding from general education budgets that will likely be slashed due to federal and state revenue shortfalls.
What has surprised you about your work?
There have been many learnings but the most surprising is how much education my team and I have to do about teletherapy. People have many misconceptions, from thinking that robots are providing therapy to believing that it’s impossible to provide virtual services effectively. I have to say that the current migration to online work settings is helping us in that regard.
Enable My Child offers a lot of different services and routes to get care. What makes up the bulk of your day-to-day work?
Our therapy services through schools and early intervention programs make up the great majority of our work. Behind the curtain, we are busy with developing sophisticated technology such as AI tools to enhance quality of care, rethinking operations of an ever growing remote workforce in 40+ states, and continuously creating added value for our customers.
What’s next for you and Enable My Child? How do you envision yourself and your company changing over the next year, 5 years, 10 years?
This year, we want Enable My Child to become an online hub for all things related to children’s wellness. Right now, we’re preparing to launch our consumer-facing platform, which might already be out by the time this publishes. While we planned on launching it later in the year, the increase in demand we’ve seen from parents with children in need of mental health services, as well as other therapy services, pushed us to act now. There are many children and families struggling socially, emotionally, and physically right now, so we want to ensure they receive the care they need and deserve. In addition to therapy services, we’re offering free resources, such as “Ask a Therapist” consultations, parent webinars, milestone charts, parenting advice, play tips, and more through a new offering called the Parent Corner on our website.
Our longer-term vision for Enable My Child is to leverage our proprietary technology and vast therapy network to create a pediatric therapy marketplace where supply (ie: therapists and resources) aligns with demand (ie: the growing number of children and families in need of services). Our core offering will always be therapy, but we realize the power of our platform and resources to reach our ultimate goal, which is to enable every child’s present and future, no matter where they are.
While the circumstances of the pandemic are unfortunate, I believe its impact on the wider healthcare system will be huge and lead to a healthcare revolution. Virtual health services are more efficient, cost-effective, and even more intelligent thanks to developments in emerging technology. Many schools and organizations have been slow to adopt new technology because there was a lack of understanding regarding teletherapy but those conversations are completely different today. Schools and therapy providers across the country have been forced to adapt, and in the process, they’re realizing that teletherapy is not only more accessible, more efficient, and less expensive, it’s the way of the future.
Read more about Syed Mohammed and Enable My Child:
Enable My Child: Syed Mohammed Offers Teletherapy for Self-Isolated Kids
