In this interview from Appian World 2026, Jamie Turner, founder and president of Acclaim Autism, joins Medhat Galal, senior vice president of engineering at Appian, to talk with theCUBE's Dave Vellante and co-host Alison Kosik about how AI-powered process orchestration is cutting autism services onboarding from six months to four days. Turner founded Acclaim Autism to address chronic wait lists for behavioral services, where families often waited months or years to access care. She explains that even with staff available, patient onboarding consumed six months — largely due to the complexity of validating unstructured clinical documents against insurance requirements that varied by geography and coverage. Galal details how Appian's platform eliminated the coordination tax of email handoffs and paper records by digitizing the entire intake workflow, while AI extracted and validated those clinical notes with an error rate of just 5%.
The conversation also explores the personal stakes behind the technology. Galal shares that his own eldest child is on the spectrum and that his family's first intake took 14 months — making his collaboration with Acclaim Autism deeply personal. Turner notes that clinicians freed from administrative burden can redirect their time to the children they serve, and outlines the next frontier: AI-assisted scheduling that matches patients with staff across 40 to 50 clinical and logistical variables. Both guests are clear that treatment planning remains firmly in human hands, governed by HIPAA regulations and ethical guidelines from certification bodies. Galal walks through how Appian builds governance into the platform itself — process structure prevents AI from operating outside defined boundaries, while a data fabric with column-level security ensures AI sees only what it is permitted to see. A newly launched agentic reasoning capability, announced at the conference, is set to extend those guardrails to more complex multi-step planning tasks. From compressing multi-month intake ordeals to just days to expanding clinical capacity for more children, both guests make the case that the most powerful AI deployments start with high-value bottlenecks and build iteratively from there.
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This interview at Appian World 2026 explores digitizing patient intake and workforce planning through enterprise automation and artificial intelligence. Alison Kosik of theCUBE Research and Dave Vellante of theCUBE Research host the discussion with Jamie Turner of Acclaim Autism, founder and president, and Medhat Galal of Appian, senior vice president of engineering.
Turner reports a reduction in intake time from six months to four days, resulting in increased clinician capacity and patient access. Galal emphasizes Appian's integrated data fabric, built-in security and governance and agentic reasoning capabilities to optimize workforce planning. The conversation examines how Appian's platform and AI streamline patient onboarding, enable AI-enabled document ingestion for unstructured clinical records and deploy agentic reasoning to support staff planning and scheduling.
Key takeaways include measurable reductions in intake time, improved patient access and practical advice to begin with high-value low-complexity processes and iterate rapidly, as underscored by Kosik and Vellante. The discussion provides actionable insights for healthcare operations, enterprise automation, workforce optimization and digital transformation.
In this interview from Appian World 2026, Jamie Turner, founder and president of Acclaim Autism, joins Medhat Galal, senior vice president of engineering at Appian, to talk with theCUBE's Dave Vellante and co-host Alison Kosik about how AI-powered process orchestration is cutting autism services onboarding from six months to four days. Turner founded Acclaim Autism to address chronic wait lists for behavioral services, where families often waited months or years to access care. She explains that even with staff available, patient onboarding consumed six month...Read more
>> Welcome to Appian World 26. We are streaming live here in Orlando. I'm Alison Kosik alongside Dave Vellante. And things are really hopping now. It is loud in here. I think everybody's eating and mingling, and having a great time.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah. For the folks who joined us in our kickoff, it was much quieter.
Alison Kosik
>> It was.
Dave Vellante
>> And we told you it was going to get booming and it is, it's bouncing.
Alison Kosik
>> And we're going to continue our interviews over the noise and fun that's happening here. I want to bring in our guests that are sitting here at theCUBE. We've got Jamie Turner, the founder and president of Acclaim Autism. Welcome to theCUBE. And we've got Medhat Galal, the senior vice president of Engineering at Appian. Welcome to theCUBE as well.
Medhat Galal
>> Thank you.
Alison Kosik
>> Jamie, I'm going to start with you. I'm curious about how you got started with Acclaim Autism. Why did you start it? And what made patient onboarding a critical challenge for you to solve? And how did you go about solving it, and what was the outcome?
Jamie Turner
>> Sure. I started Acclaim Autism. There were very long wait lists for behavioral services throughout the country. And a lot of parents were getting really, really frustrated at waiting months or sometimes years just to access the care that their kids really needed. So I decided to enter the field and do something about it. I was in a related field beforehand. And we started this, and we do provide services throughout our communities and in our clinics. We love what we do, but the patient onboarding time was taking about six months. So even once we had staff available, it could take up to six months to get somebody started. And that was just completely unacceptable to me. So we started to partner with Appian to find out ways to simplify that process and maybe use AI as well. And we were able to get that six months down to about four days.
Alison Kosik
>> Medhat, how was that possible?
Medhat Galal
>> Well, Appian technology enables the coordination of all that it takes to get someone through the door all the way until they receive services. Our data capabilities, our process capabilities, and AI simplify the orchestration of patient intake process forms, just taking that data in might be notes as you do interviews all the way until it's digitized so that the professionals can actually arbitrate what do they need to do in that case, how to recommend additional services. Appian orchestrates that front door all the way to the back office.
Dave Vellante
>> So what did it take? Well, I read that in the notes from six months down to, I mean, just compressed it. That's an astounding acceleration. How long did it take you guys to work together to get to that point where you could achieve that outcome? What did you have to do? What kind of prerequisites were there?
Jamie Turner
>> It took a couple of months.
Dave Vellante
>> That's it. Wow.
Jamie Turner
>> Yeah. So we had to first of all identify the process, digitize the process, which is where Appian came in and really helped us to digitalize our data and simplify things. And then we looked at the biggest bottleneck to the process, which was reading all these unstructured clinical documents we were getting from other providers and determining, "Okay, will these documents meet an insurance company's requirements or won't they?" And humans in the past really struggled with that. It was really complex with all the regulations that varied based off where someone lives, what insurance they have. And sometimes they would end up just guessing and sending it off to the insurance company. It would take time to review it, say no, send it back to us. We'd go back to the family and the wheels just kept turning.
Dave Vellante
>> Wow.
Jamie Turner
>> So we decided to insert AI and to read those documents, and the error weight went down to 5%.
Dave Vellante
>> So how did you visualize it? I presume it wasn't a giant whiteboard. You've got tools to help do that. You've got discovery. Can you describe that?
Medhat Galal
>> There was an interaction model. I mean, Appian is very familiar with some of these coordination bounce around problems in the enterprise. A lot of people use emails and spreadsheets, and documents in dossier. And remember, some of these documents, they may have had to do a parent patient interview on site. The documents are there, but maybe the provider is not available, and they have to figure out how to digitize it, maybe scan it and then send it over an email. They're on vacation that comes back. With a digitized process, there is no loss in translation. There is no drop off in a task. You know how long anything is waiting in a queue? Just that alone, that coordination tax gets eliminated. Through working together what is the critical steps, and how to digitize that and who needs to do what, where and when. So Appian just automatically orchestrates that. And then on top of that, for the unstructured information, when you use AI to extract these notes, case notes, handwriting notes, to get them in this digital format, it enables the process to take it front door all the way to the backend so that you can arbitrate, you can make business decisions, you can make recommendations all in one seamless flow as opposed to the disjointed experience that you have just dealing with Microsoft Word or email.
Dave Vellante
>> I mean, healthcare is one of these industries that has been so ripe for transformation for so long. I mean, mobile changed things a little bit, but what are you seeing with AI, how organizations are thinking about transforming healthcare?
Medhat Galal
>> Well, everybody wants everything faster, better, and cheaper. And maybe we didn't really talk about this that much, but I'm on the receiving end of the services that Jamie provides. My eldest is actually on a spectrum.
Alison Kosik
>> Oh, wow.
Dave Vellante
>> Oh, wow.
Medhat Galal
>> So our first intake was 14 months long. We actually told the story on stage last year. I know what it takes because the documents are bouncing around between the parents who are not very educated, and that's the same problem on the business side. Insurance and insurance providers, they're struggling between the providers, the patients themselves, and they want to coordinate that multiplayer problem. So we help them digitize the interaction for the consumer side of things. They have document ingestion problems. We auto help them with that as well. And you get the orchestration piece and the digitization piece correctly, you cut out a lot of the waste in the middle. All of Appian customers in healthcare industry have very similar problems just on a document ingestion alone, the digital notes, handwriting notes, lab results, interview questions, just to summarize it.
Dave Vellante
>> I mean, what does that mean for a family? As opposed to... Describe the before and after for a typical family going through this process.
Medhat Galal
>> We didn't receive services through them, but I sympathize as a technologist because I know that my first kid was diagnosed, it took 14 months just to get the scheduling, to get the information in place, get the interviews. It was very disorienting process. We had to send an email, and someone has to reply back. We have to pick up the phone. When it's digital, you know exactly whether you're waiting on someone or someone is waiting on you. That's a very unchartered territory when you're dealing in the current process that's very chaotic. With my second kid, it was a more digital process. They didn't get diagnosed, luckily, but it was very easy. We knew exactly what we needed to do, how to receive the service. And we started within three weeks as opposed to what took seven months later. And within four months, he was in of the diagnosis and out of diagnosis. That's a life-changing difference.
Alison Kosik
>> Go ahead, Jamie. Jump in.
Jamie Turner
>> Sorry, what was your question?
Dave Vellante
>> So what kind of feedback are you getting from patients and families? I'm curious to know what they're telling you.
Jamie Turner
>> Well, the intake process, they're absolutely thrilled with it. Parents would frequently complain. When their child gets diagnosed, they were used to just sitting on wait list for months or years, waiting for the next available provider, whoever it is. And once they found someone who was a match, then they'd submit documents and more documents, and more documents. And it was just back and forth, and they were very, very frustrated. So now they're just thrilled that they're going from months of onboarding to just a couple days.
Alison Kosik
>> Medhat, how does it feel that you're at the forefront of technology that's literally changing people's lives? And you can empathize because you have a child on this spectrum. Talk me through how that feels.
Medhat Galal
>> It was very heartwarming. When I learned about Jamie's story and we were helping the teams, I actually work with our services teams and our technology teams to help them get that technology in place as soon as possible because I've seen the struggle myself. So knowing that actually what we do changes lives downstream was personal to me. I've seen this. I sympathize with all the parents that are going through the same journey. Now, this journey luckily is nine, 10 years behind me, but for everybody else that is entering, there's disorientation. You have very little knowledge who to coordinate. And even if you are diagnosed and get provision services, there's still the insurance company that needs certain paperwork completed, which is a process just to do that. So just smoothing out their services with the parents, the parents with the diagnosis with the insurance company just to receive the services, which are expensive, just night and day difference when you feel you've made a change, you made a difference.
Dave Vellante
>> Jamie, when you take an onboarding from six months down to days, you're eliminating a lot of paper cuts for the organization. So how did you redirect that resource? How are they spending their time? What kind of other value are they able to add to the organization? What have you learned from that whole process?
Jamie Turner
>> As an organization, we're absolutely more efficient. We're freeing up our clinicians' time to spend less time on paperwork and administrative burden, and really put the focus back on the kids, which is why people get into this field to begin with. So that's what they do every day. What we've learned is there's other AI use cases that we started to work on. For example, just optimizing our staff schedules, like figuring out how to pair a new patient with a staff member. There's 40 to 50 different variables we look at to determine, will this be a good match? We don't want them driving across the state to go to someone's house. Geography's a factor. Clinical fit's a factor. And so now we're using AI to give us options to say, "These five staff members might be a great fit for this kid. What do you think?"
Dave Vellante
>> Do you see a point where the AI actually starts developing plans and presenting them, and maybe even implementing them?
Jamie Turner
>> Well, treatment planning's an ethical line that we don't cross. A child's unique, and not the aggregate of other kids that fit into an AI model. So there are definitely guardrails in place that we have and hard rules that we won't follow.
Dave Vellante
>> And those are very clear in your industry, right?
Jamie Turner
>> Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
Dave Vellante
>> Things like HIPAA and so forth.
Jamie Turner
>> There's HIPAA regulations, there's ethical guidelines that certification bodies make us follow, and they're there for very good reason. Humans should be determining treatment goals in conjunction with families for these kids.
Dave Vellante
>> So Appian software can understand those-
Medhat Galal
>> A hundred percent because obviously it's not just about giving organizations the tools to smooth out all the rough edges in the process, handle the coordination task like lifecycle, also the visibility. How fast am I producing results? How can I effectively distribute my resources and my people, and my staff, and my expertise to better handle the caseload that comes in, leaving the humans to do the best job they can do without all the toil that comes with the administrative work that is frankly very expensive for organizations to even maintain when a technology can just handle that effectively and let the expertise in the staff to deal with the actual cases. And for example, one of the things that you touched upon, "How did you deploy the staff differently?" If they could handle that many cases in a month, cutting it down for six months to four days, they can handle that many more cases by virtue of deploying resources differently. The number of kids that would be able to receive treatment, not waiting in line, is even greater.
Dave Vellante
>> So Jamie, you have the head of engineering at Appian here. So he's obviously got some resources. He's got some juice in the organization. What do you want him to work on?
Jamie Turner
>> I would say taking our workforce planning and scheduling to the next level is definitely the next iteration for us, not just for new patients that come in the door, but we have a workforce of hundreds of people. How do we optimize those schedules to make the most use of our limited clinical resources to make the largest benefit to our patients? And that's the next iteration for us.
Alison Kosik
>> So Medhat, how do you tackle that issue?
Medhat Galal
>> So we built a brand new capability for agentic reasoning. So the initial AI that Acclaim Autism have used is like the first generation agent capability that can do single step reasoning, do certain things, and it worked really well for them on the intake process. We've built capability and launched late last year and continued to evolve it. It's one of the major announcements this conference to do more planning, test breakdown, and that agentic reasoning is going to enable them to do things like, let me try different metrices for the planning of my staff scheduling, and we're going to work hand in hand together to make sure that it actually works very well in their case as well. That agentic reasoning I think is going to be a very powerful combination to start doing the higher level thinking process with the right guardrails and boundaries so that they can still apply the ethical guidelines that they need to have.
Dave Vellante
>> I want to ask you about security and governance. And I like to say they're two sides of the same coin, but they're different.
Jamie Turner
>> They are.
Dave Vellante
>> And the standard line is you can't bolt it on. It can't be an afterthought. What does that mean from an engineering perspective? How do you design in security and governance so that your customers can feel safe, secure, and confident?
Medhat Galal
>> Security and governance is the first class citizen for us because as you've seen, we handle highly regulated processes across the world, from financial services, healthcare systems and whatnot. Now, Appian itself as a first principled approach on security and governance has certain capabilities. Process itself is a good guardrail for AI not to ever step outside the box you put it in. So if AI is designed, you're just going to extract this part of that information from this page. It can't step outside the box. It may make a mistake inside that box, but it's not going to step outside the box. That's the first layer. The second layer has to do with the data and the data handling. Our data fabric technology is designed to have column level security, low level security so that you can only allow the AI and humans to see only the data they're meant to see in the moment they need to see it. So if you change the security paradigm in real time, we will compute that and only allow the AI to use that, and that's just the functional layer. Below that, we have all the compliance regimes and security certifications for how we handle sensitive data, how we handle financial data, how we handle healthcare data. And there are guardrails and governance from the product all the way to the last software engineer that is working on a product to cater to the highest regulated environments ever.
Dave Vellante
>> So two months, you said. Did that include a POC or no?
Jamie Turner
>> No. No.
Dave Vellante
>> Okay. So did you do a POC?
Jamie Turner
>> Yes.
Dave Vellante
>> You did a POC?
Jamie Turner
>> It included a POC. Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> And then that took what, weeks?
Jamie Turner
>> A couple of weeks, yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> A couple of weeks.
Jamie Turner
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> And then you implemented, two months is amazing actually to compress it from six months to days. If you had a mulligan, I don't know if you guys golf. I really don't. I mean, I golf, but I'm bad. If you had a mulligan, what would you do differently?
Jamie Turner
>> What do you mean a mulligan?
Dave Vellante
>> Like a do-over.
Jamie Turner
>> A do-over?
Dave Vellante
>> You don't golf?
Jamie Turner
>> No, I don't golf. A do-over. I'd probably try and tap Appian for some of the more resources and help us even more than they did. They've been great partners.
Dave Vellante
>> You mean the professional services resources?
Jamie Turner
>> Well, Appian's internal resources. They've helped us a great deal, and I think having access to people at Medhat's level has been really helpful for us.
Alison Kosik
>> Let me ask the question, and either of you can answer it. What's the one thing organizations are getting wrong about digital transformation today? Both of you can hop in and answer.
Medhat Galal
>> You want to start?
Jamie Turner
>> In terms of what they get wrong about digital transformation?
Alison Kosik
>> Yeah.
Jamie Turner
>> I think people just try to do too much, whereas you can really just take a process, digitize it, insert AI where it adds some value, and iterate from there and just keep going.
Alison Kosik
>> What are your thoughts?
Medhat Galal
>> I mean, it's perfect land on it. I'm just going to use the golf analogy because I have a perfect slide that has a person that is puttering and says, ain't small, this small. I wish, and I want to tell every organization. It's important to get started. Don't wait too long. The next step will reveal itself. Take something high value, low complexity, get started, get the motion, get the wheels turning, and then pull on the next thread and the next set. Don't try to make the perfect, the enemy of the good, visualize the entire process, just get started, get going, and realize value sooner.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah, it's interesting. Michael Dell gave similar advice. You don't always get the high value advice. A lot of times they are, pick something that's not risky. But Michael Dell said exactly what you said, Medhat, because he said, "You've got to pick something of high value, or what are you doing?"
Medhat Galal
>> That's right.
Dave Vellante
>> Obviously, manage the risk, but get started on that, and then you're going to start to see returns faster. You agree? I see you nodding.
Jamie Turner
>> Yeah, absolutely. For us, I mean, six months to get a patient started while you're holding a staff member's spot on their caseload. You don't get much more high value than that. You're making better use of our staff members. You're getting started with services earlier for kids. So pick that bottleneck and fix it.
Dave Vellante
>> Were people reticent at first when you first started this or were they like, "Bring it on?"
Jamie Turner
>> In our field, there's a severe lack of software which helps with operations, so there's no resistance to change whatsoever. Just bring on whatever you have.
Dave Vellante
>> That's great. Well, congratulations. I mean, what a story.
Alison Kosik
>> It's amazing.
Medhat Galal
>> Thank you.
Jamie Turner
>> Thank you.
Alison Kosik
>> And you're literally impacting lives, which we think of technology and so many people are scared of AI and...
Medhat Galal
>> I think that's what people have to realize when they work with technology. And I urge every technologist. When you're working on technology, just don't think about the feature and functionality that you're building within your respective products. Think about the end game. You're almost always helping somebody achieve certain outcomes for the people that they serve. That's what we're here for. Technology for the sake of technology is not very useful. Technology to better human lives, to better processes, to serve citizens better is the way to go when you think about the mindset you need to have to build those technologies.
Dave Vellante
>> I love that. Value. Think about the value.
Medhat Galal
>> That's right.
Dave Vellante
>> Good advice.
Alison Kosik
>> All right. Thanks so much for stepping here to theCUBE. Appreciate your time.
Medhat Galal
>> Great. Thank you.
Alison Kosik
>> And you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live technology coverage. Thanks for watching.
Alison Kosik
Dave Vellante