Ms. Schneider is the CEO of Fort Health, a virtual mental health provider for children and adolescents.
“Pediatricians, way back when, they were doing vaccinations. As recently as 10 years ago, it was sick care,” Ms. Schneider told Becker’s. “Now, they are more and more in the business of behavioral healthcare. They do not want to be in that business.”
A 2019 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics declared pediatricians need to take on a larger role in mental healthcare — but the majority “do not feel prepared to do so.” Fort Health, launched in 2023, aims to support pediatricians by providing behavioral healthcare so they can focus on primary care, Ms. Schneider said.
“We provide clinical progress updates, discharge summaries. Sometimes, we drop that on the patients chart. We send [pediatricians] summaries every month saying, ‘This is where your kiddos are.’ I think we relieve them of a pretty big burden, ” she said.
Fort Health also works with schools to provide collaborative care, Ms. Schneider said. Care navigators connect Fort Health therapists and psychiatrists with pediatricians, educators and parents.
“It’s a really nice model, which is different from typical care, where parents are trying to figure all this out,” she said.
Filling the gaps in youth mental health
For a long time, pediatric mental health has largely been fragmented and made up of small, independent providers, Ms. Schneider said. The space is beginning to consolidate, she said, by providing more incorporation of technology to help providers, patients and families.
Ms. Schneider also expects to see parents more closely involved in their children’s mental health treatment.
In 2023, new billing codes were introduced to allow psychologists and other providers to bill for behavioral management training provided to parents and caregivers to help them manage their children’s needs. Ms. Schneider said she hopes to see increasing utilization of these services, as parents become more receptive to them.
“As parents, we aren’t born with these wonderful parental skills to help our child become a productive, amazing human being, and reduce anxiety and depression,” she said. “We really need someone to train us.”
Measurement-based care will also become increasingly important in behavioral health, Ms. Schneider said. Less than 20% of behavioral health providers integrated measurement-based care into their practices, according to a 2020 study in JAMA Psychiatry.
Payers are asking for data and collecting data of their own more often, Ms. Schneider said.
“In the future, I would speculate that reimbursement will factor in measurement-based care,” she said. “In our case, our pediatricians require it. … They want to see the data.”
