Children's Nebraska is leveraging excitement for its new facility to invest in behavioral health across the organization.
The Omaha, Neb.-based system is slated to open its $114 million, 40-bed Behavioral Health & Wellness Center at Children’s Nebraska in early 2026.
In the meantime, Renee Rafferty, senior vice president of behavioral health at Children's Nebraska, is focused on building up the new facilitiy's workforce and integrating behavioral health across the system.
Children's Nebraska is also investing in new technologies to treat behavioral health — including a holographic telehealth platform that can bring psychiatrists from Omaha to western Nebraska.
Ms. Rafferty sat down with Becker's to share more about the system's mental health strategy.
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: You're preparing to open a new children's mental health center. What goes into making that facility as successful as it can be when it opens in 2026?
Renee Rafferty: The amount of community collaboration and investment in creating a state-of-the-art facility has been amazing to me. The community really has stepped up to make sure that we have the funding we need to create this incredible resource, and the design to really have a therapeutic, multisensory environment that welcomes the community. Getting the behavioral health science into the design has been the focus for the architects and the clinical team to work closely together. When I came on, that had already been happening. It's been happening for years, this investment, and this last year has been really fine-tuning and bringing the science into the interior and exterior design, ensuring that we have a really open concept.
The other planning that keeps me up at night is the workforce recruitment and ensuring that we have a multidisciplinary team ready to open in 2026. There's a lot of excitement and passion, even inside of Children's Nebraska. We have nurses, social workers and physicians that are all excited and even wanting to move over to the Behavioral and Wellness Center. We're tapping into that and building a plan for our staff to get the training they need if they would like to come over to the new center, but also integrating behavioral health into the whole organization. That's been a benefit of this planning time. We're really leveraging that to double down on bringing behavioral resources to the frontline.
Q: How are you incorporating science into the design of the facility?
RR: We have a clinical team that works alongside human experience and architect teams. They're working to look at lighting, at the shape of the walls and the sensory experience of the patient when they come in. They're ensuring that we have rooms that allow for relaxation and desecration. How do we leverage light from the outside, and how do we give the patient and family control in the environment, to either increase connection to nature, using their sense of touch or sound to feel connected to the healing experience.
Every aspect of how we engage and feel is thought about through the outside and the inside. What's really great is we have sensory rooms throughout the building, not just in one area, not just in crisis assessment or inpatient, but in outpatient and partial hospitalization. Nature has been incorporated in the design as well. It's very much visual images that we know are soothing. When you look at trees, mountains and water, you get a sense of being calm and grounded.
Q: The center will include the first pediatric crisis assessment center in the region. How is this different from other models of care?
RR: Crisis care has really come a long way. In 2022, we got national best practice for youth crisis care. We really want to align with that national best practice. Some of the elements of that are creating an open, calming environment and providing behavioral healthcare that includes lived experience. People with lived experience can share their sense of hope and value, and that's as therapeutic as any other part of the treatment environment.
The other piece that I like to bring out about this is that it's trauma-informed. We're thinking from the lens of how we decrease trauma that can occur for people experiencing mental health crises as they're experiencing it in our setting. Allowing for patients to move and connect in group therapy is very different than if you went to an emergency room. It looks different, in part, because of the behavioral health specialized care team, but also because the environment allows for de-escalation and a specialized focus on early intervention in a crisis. You can come in for an urgent need. It doesn't have to be that you're in a full-blown crisis. You can come in and get care from a therapist immediately, if a child is experiencing anxiety or school refusal. Sometimes people go to the emergency room and they have a lower level of need, but we want to make sure they get the right provider at the right time. This assessment center allows for different levels of crisis. I think it signals to families to come in earlier. Don't wait until the crisis gets worse.
Q: What other behavioral health initiatives are top of mind for you at Children's Nebraska?
RR: The first thing I want to highlight is our commitment to caring for the whole state of Nebraska, really ensuring that we have education and behavioral health in primary care. We created a program we call COPE - children's outreach and provider education. We collaborate with the REACH Institute to provide training for primary care providers, bridging the gap for behavioral health. We're ensuring that when children go to primary care, they can be treated for mental health conditions as well, and that providers feel comfortable doing that. Not only is the training there, but they can also reach out to our team of psychiatrists and get support if they need it in the moment.
Another area I'm really excited about is technology integration. Children's Nebraska is so committed to innovative strategies and tools. We'll be piloting a holographic telehealth platform called Glow. It's the first one in the world. It's a pretty amazing point-to-point system. We have a psychiatrist in Omaha that will be in a holographic form in our new behavioral health urgent care in Kearney. It's neat because it expands telehealth to be more personal, and I think, exciting. Kids are pretty excited about the opportunity to see a hologram when they're getting care. It's a really fun thing to share with the community too.