Scale the science.
Close the gap between research and the moment a child needs help.
NeuroPath Health is built around the Brief Treatment Clinic at Kennedy Krieger Institute. The methodology is peer-reviewed. The work in Wicomico County is documented in public testimony. We are not a tech company that hired a clinical advisor — we are a clinical practice that built the software it always wished existed.
The research-to-practice gap isn't a people problem. It's a conditions problem.
Inadequate documentation. Crushing caseloads. Vanishing supervision. Thirty-percent-plus staff turnover. These conditions would defeat any practitioner on their best day. The published behavioral-science literature already contains the answers — they just don't reach the moment a child is escalating in a Tier 1 classroom in rural Maryland, or the moment a parent is alone at 6 PM trying to keep dinner from coming apart.
NeuroPath is the infrastructure that lets excellent clinicians actually deliver what they already know works. Not a chatbot. Not a wellness app. A decision-support platform grounded in seventy years of behavioral science and validated against the same standards that gate publication in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.
Five audiences — schools, hospitals, families, specialists, and our own clinical team — share one Blueprint per child. The Blueprint is the source of truth. Everything in NeuroPath is what happens when the Blueprint meets the moment.
Built around the Brief Treatment Clinic at Kennedy Krieger.
Kennedy Krieger Institute is one of the country's referral destinations for the most complex pediatric behavioral cases — children whose Tier 2 or Tier 3 plans have stalled in their home district, or whose presentation is severe enough that local resources cannot safely manage the work alone.
The Brief Treatment Clinic, directed by Dr. Matt Edelstein, is the consultation arm. School districts and pediatric systems across the mid-Atlantic refer cases that need specialized assessment, plan revision, or staff training. The clinic does not replace the local team — it equips them. Every recommendation comes back as a documented, classroom-implementable protocol that the receiving district can run with.
NeuroPath was built from the inside of that clinic. Every clinical decision tree, every safety-net trigger, every prompt scaffold inside the platform was extracted from how the Brief Treatment Clinic actually works the cases it sees. The software is the consultation, made portable.
Two backgrounds, one discipline.
A licensed psychologist who runs a clinical consult practice, and a healthcare operator who built the validation protocol around it. NeuroPath exists because both perspectives — the clinician and the operator — are required to scale a clinical methodology without diluting it.
Director of the Brief Treatment Clinic at Kennedy Krieger Institute and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. A dually licensed psychologist (PsyD) and Board-Certified Behavior Analyst at the doctoral level (BCBA-D), with over a decade of clinical and research experience in the assessment and treatment of challenging behavior in pediatric populations.
Earned his B.A. from Boston University, his M.A. from Columbia University, and his doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University (GSAPP). His research has been cited more than 55 times in peer-reviewed literature. The clinical instruments embedded in NeuroPath — including the preference assessment and the Structured Functional Behavior Interview — are derived directly from his published work. His most recent paper, Reducing emergency department utilization for pediatric behavioral health crises through high-intensity outpatient behavioral intervention (Edelstein, Picardo, Hoff, & Sommerhalder), was accepted May 2026 in Evidence-Based Practice in Child and Adolescent Mental Health: a 65-child cohort referred to outpatient behavioral treatment from EDs in the mid-Atlantic, with very large post-treatment reductions in subsequent ED revisits (d = 1.70), functional impairment (d = 2.10), and challenging behaviors (d = 0.70).
Has spent the past decade documenting and refining the protocols that NeuroPath now operationalizes — counter-control management, functional communication training, behavioral currency systems, and the safety-net structures that keep AI-assisted recommendations inside the boundaries of evidence-based practice.
NeuroPath wasn’t born in a lab or a boardroom — it was built out of necessity. As the parent of a neurodivergent child, Manal lived a frustration that is universal to special education: brilliant clinical insights are consistently trapped in static 40-page PDF documents that no one reads when they need them most.
With a background spanning high-stakes finance, diplomatic service, and operational data work, Manal recognized this as a fundamental data-delivery problem. A Yale alum and former hedge fund partner, he spent his career building deep-value data pipelines and analytical systems — and saw that the same operational rigor could translate peer-reviewed behavioral science into accessible, real-time intelligence for educators and caregivers.
Today, he partners with Dr. Edelstein to scale that solution: replacing static PDFs with AI-driven systems that put expert behavioral guidance directly in the hands of classroom staff and parents at the moment it’s needed.
Wicomico County, Maryland: where the conditions problem is acute.
Eastern Shore Maryland is the kind of region the published literature gets least credit for serving. Specialized clinical resources are scarce. Out-of-district placement costs are high. The kids who need the most don't have access to the most. NeuroPath's clinical work in Wicomico County — documented in legislative testimony, district records, and the per-school crisis logs — is what the platform was built to address.
| 3× | Per week. A police car transports a Wicomico student to the emergency room for psychiatric evaluation. Wicomico County Public Schools, behavioral-incident records. |
| 750+ | Emergency psychiatric petitions filed from Wicomico schools over an eight-year window. Some involving children as young as five years old. Maryland legislative testimony, Eastern Shore behavioral-health hearings. |
| 70 → 1 | Of seventy MANSEF special-education schools statewide, exactly one is on the entire Eastern Shore. Zero on the Lower Shore. When a Wicomico student needs separate-day placement, the family drives across the Bay Bridge or accepts a longer waitlist. Maryland Association of Nonpublic Special Education Facilities (MANSEF), public roster. |
| $42K | Average annual cost of one out-of-district placement. The check the district writes when in-school support fails — multiplied by the number of placements that could have been prevented with earlier intervention. Wicomico County Public Schools, special-education budget filings. |
An independent clinician scoring Dr. Edelstein's outputs blinded against the AI's, against a peer-review-grade rubric. At month twelve, Wicomico has documented proof — not a vendor's promise — that the platform's guidance is clinically equivalent to or better than an expert's. Findings to be submitted to the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis or Behavior Analysis in Practice.
Empirically validated. Not vendor-promised.
NeuroPath does not ask the field to take its word for clinical rigor. The behavior-plan generator was validated in a 22-profile paper study constructed to span ninety-five percent of the behavioral problem-space clinicians actually encounter. The protocol, the cohort design, the scoring rubric, and the safety-net routing are all documented in a methodology paper any district or hospital privacy officer can read end-to-end before inviting the system into their environment.
- Cohort 22 synthetic kindergarten profiles constructed to span the behavioral spectrum clinicians actually encounter. No real-student data were used. The cohort design is documented and reproducible.
- Scoring Interobserver Agreement (IOA) 5-dimension rubric — the gold-standard validation method used in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and Behavior Analysis in Practice. Pass criteria are pre-specified, not adjusted post-hoc.
- Safety net Five mandatory-reporting triggers that halt plan generation — suicidality, abuse, neglect, weapons, substances. Deterministic bypass; no algorithm overrides clinical or legal reporting obligations.
- Scaffold Five-component Tier 1 plan structure — antecedents, replacement skill, consequence strategies, reinforcement plan, and integrity check — every section cited back to source documentation the receiving practitioner can verify.
- Drift audit Daily clinical review by Dr. Edelstein across every plan generated in the live pilot. Drift between AI output and standard-of-care is logged and triangulated against the methodology paper's pass criteria.
Read the full methodology paper →
Core methods underlying this pipeline are the subject of U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 64/051,551, filed April 28, 2026. Patent Pending — details on the Trust page →
Source documentation, public record
- Edelstein, M., Mehta, M. A 22-profile paper-validation study of the clinical decision tree behind NeuroPath Health's Tier 1 BIP generator. NeuroPath Health methodology paper, available at /methodology-paper.html.
- Wicomico County Public Schools. Behavioral-incident reporting records and special-education budget filings, public-information requests on file with the district.
- Maryland General Assembly. Eastern Shore behavioral-health hearings and committee testimony — public legislative record.
- MANSEF. Maryland Association of Nonpublic Special Education Facilities, public schools roster.
- Bondy, A. & Frost, L. (2001). Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS), Phase 1–2 protocols, referenced in NeuroPath's AAC generation pipeline.
- Hanley, G. P. et al. (2014). Practical Functional Assessment and skills-based treatment, referenced in the Tolerance-for-Delay protocols inside Classroom Compass.
- Simonsen, B. et al. (2008). Tier-1 PBIS framework, referenced in the school-side Behavior Plan scaffolding.
Where citation links are not yet available, the source documents are available on request to matt.edelstein@neuropathhealth.com.
If you run a school district, a pediatric system, or a clinical practice:
we built this for you.
Pilots are sized for districts and clinics that want to evaluate clinical equivalence under their own roof. The methodology is open. The validation is documented. The next conversation is yours.