Start with the two Minnesota checks
Most "how to choose an ABA provider" advice is written for a national audience and skips the two things that decide the question fastest here. Ask these before anything else, because a wrong answer to either ends the conversation:
1. Are they an enrolled EIDBI provider with Minnesota DHS? EIDBI is the benefit that pays for autism therapy in this state. A provider who isn't enrolled can't bill it, however good they are. Ability Avenues is EIDBI enrolled.
2. Which specific plans do they bill? Push for names, not categories. "We take most major insurance" is not an answer — it's a phrase that sounds like one. Ability Avenues bills Straight Medical Assistance and Blue Plus, which covers both the Medical Assistance and MinnesotaCare products. That's the complete list, and we'd rather you know it now than after an intake call.
One honest complication, because it catches families off guard: if your child has commercial insurance, that plan is the primary payer under Minnesota rules, and Medical Assistance sits behind it as a wraparound. You generally don't have to drop a private plan to get MA — and shouldn't be told to. But since we don't bill commercial plans, we can't tell you from a webpage whether therapy with us would be covered for your family. That one takes a phone call, and we'd rather say so than guess. Our insurance page explains the mechanism in full.
The questions worth asking any provider
Print this, or pull it up on your phone during the call. It's built to be asked of everyone you talk to — us included — because the value is in comparing answers to the same questions, not in any single answer.
What good answers sound like
The questions are the easy part. Here's how to read what comes back.
Specific beats reassuring. "Our BCBAs are very involved" is a feeling. "Your BCBA would observe roughly every other session and you'd get a written progress summary monthly" is a fact you can hold someone to. When an answer is warm but vague, ask the same question again with the word "how often" in it.
"I don't know, let me find out" is a green flag. It's the sound of someone who doesn't improvise. Treat it as a good sign, not a gap.
Watch how they talk about your child's hard moments. You're listening for whether difficult behavior gets described as communication to understand, or as a problem to eliminate. That answer tells you more about a clinical culture than any credential on the wall.
At two and three, therapy should look like play. If a provider describes a preschooler's day as mostly sitting at a table doing drills, that's worth a direct follow-up. Play is the teaching method at that age, not a warm-up before it.
Turnover answers deserve a follow-up. Behavior technician turnover is a real, industry-wide pressure, and a provider who claims none is a provider you should ask again. The useful question isn't whether they have turnover — it's what happens to your child's program when it happens.
The red flags
Some of these are judgment calls. Three aren't:
- Any promise about your child's outcome. "Your child will be ready for kindergarten." "Kids who start at this age catch up." Nobody can know that. Individualized goals are the honest version; guarantees are a sales pitch wearing clinical clothes.
- Recovery or cure language. ABA builds skills. It is not a cure for autism, and a provider who suggests otherwise is either misinformed or selling.
- Pressure to sign today. Limited spots, an offer that expires, a discount for deciding on the tour. Real waitlists don't need urgency tactics, because they're already urgent.
And three that need a bit more nuance:
- Reviews you can't trace. Fabricated testimonials are a known problem in this industry, and they're difficult to spot precisely because they're written to be persuasive. Be suspicious of clusters of five-star reviews posted close together, reviews with no specifics, and quotes attributed to first names alone. You'll notice this site has no testimonials section at all: we don't publish parent quotes we can't verify and haven't been given permission to use. It's a standard we'd rather be held to than write around.
- Vagueness about who supervises. If you can't get a clear answer to "which BCBA, and how often," you've learned something.
- A flat no to observing. Ask why. There are legitimate reasons — other children's privacy in a center, or a specific point in a session where an audience genuinely disrupts a child. "We don't allow it" with no reason is different from a reason.
The inverse red flag is worth naming too: a provider who bad-mouths other providers. You'll notice we haven't named a single competitor on this page. If someone spends your tour explaining why the agency down the road is bad, you've learned what they do when they can't win on their own merits.
How do you choose the setting?
Once a provider clears the checks, the next real decision is where therapy happens — your home or our center. Two things about this are worth knowing before you ask anyone:
It's one setting, not a blend. At Ability Avenues, a family chooses home or center — we don't split a child's hours across both. Consistency is doing real work at these ages, and a child who's constantly re-orienting to a different environment spends their energy on that instead of on learning. If the choice turns out wrong, you switch. You just don't run both at once.
Distance is your logistics, not our rule. The Golden Valley center is open to any family who can get their child there and back. We won't tell you you're too far for it. That's a real trade-off for you to weigh — a long drive twice a day is a genuine cost — but the decision is yours to make, not ours to make for you.
Broadly: home tends to win on generalization, since skills get built where your child actually lives them. The center tends to win on peers and structure, which matters more as a child gets closer to school. Neither is better in the abstract. Ask any provider how they'd think about it for your specific child, and listen for whether the answer is about your child or about their capacity.
How do you decide, in the end?
After the calls, you'll have a page of answers and no obvious winner. That's normal, and it's usually the point at which families ask us how to break the tie.
Three things to weigh, in this order:
- Rule out on facts. Enrollment, plans billed, ages served, setting available. This eliminates faster than it feels like it should.
- Compare the specificity of the answers, not the warmth of the person giving them. Warmth is easy to produce for an hour. Specificity is a habit that shows up on the hard days too.
- Then trust your read of the people. You've now done the diligence, so this isn't a gut call anymore — it's an informed one. You're picking the humans who'll be in your living room, or with your child all morning, for a year. That feeling counts.
And if you're stuck between two decent options: the difference between them is almost certainly smaller than the difference between starting now and waiting six more months to decide.
Frequently asked questions
How many providers should I talk to?
Two or three is plenty. More than that and the conversations blur together — which is the real argument for writing your questions down before you call. What you're listening for isn't a winner; it's whether the answers are specific, and whether anyone tries to rush you.
Is a bigger agency better than a smaller one?
Neither size predicts quality. Size does predict trade-offs worth asking about: larger agencies tend to have more coverage when staff are out, smaller ones tend to have shorter chains between you and the person supervising your child's plan. Ask about the trade-off directly rather than guessing from headcount.
What if a provider doesn't bill our insurance?
Then that's the end of that conversation, and it's worth having first. In Minnesota, EIDBI pays through Medical Assistance, MinnesotaCare, or MA via TEFRA — so a provider has to be EIDBI-enrolled and bill your specific plan. Ability Avenues bills Straight Medical Assistance and Blue Plus. If your child's primary coverage is a commercial plan, call us and we'll help you sort out where you stand.
Can I switch providers if it isn't working?
Yes. You're not locked in, and choosing a provider is not a permanent decision. Switching does have real costs for your child — a new technician, rebuilt rapport, a fresh treatment plan — so it's worth raising your concerns with the current BCBA first. But no one gets to make you feel trapped.
If you'd like to run these questions past us, call or message us — you'll get straight answers, including the ones where the answer is "we're not the right fit." Here's how intake works if you'd rather see the whole path first.
Related reading: What EIDBI is and how it pays · EIDBI vs. ABA, untangled · How intake works · Insurance and paying for therapy