The first national behavioral health leadership collaborative within the Children’s Hospital Association has merged with a youth suicide prevention initiative to form a network of 30 hospitals focused on the advancement of pediatric behavioral health, Stacy Drury, MD, PhD, psychiatrist-in-chief at Boston Children’s, told Becker’s.
“Children’s hospitals are uniquely capable of [redesigning the whole process in a system] because of their commitment to the community and being kid-focused,” she said.
The collaborative will expand shared data collection to identify which approaches are most effective and accelerate the pace of improvement beyond traditional academic timelines, which can take years to publish findings.
“These are really important networks that allow you to activate data across all of the children’s hospitals around best practices, but also [determine] who in your community do you need to partner with,” Dr. Drury said. “Who do you need to get at the table to design an iterative quality improvement structure that has the same capacity to advance care that has happened with the sepsis network, the Children’s Oncology Network and the Vermont Oxford Network?”
It is designed to apply that data-driven model to pediatric behavioral health, enabling children’s hospitals to share insights and scale effective solutions more quickly.
“We want to have that same structure around child mental health, so that we can build the level of data necessary to drive true innovation, and not have to just rely on our own data, but also hear what is working in Colorado. What is working at CHOP? What is working at Boston Children’s?” she said.
For example, Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide Children’s operates its own behavioral health transport. When a child enters the emergency department and requires inpatient care, they can be transferred more effectively.
“[Nationwide Children’s] had all of the policies and procedures already in place,” Dr. Drury said. “They knew how to make the car, and they built it again at Cincinnati Children’s, so now we have one and there’s another one on the north shore in Boston. This idea that it would have taken me five times as long to build the procedures and policies around it, but because we can share those instantly, we’re really looking at the brief evidence-based suicide interventions for suicidality and saying, ‘How do we how do we build these? We know they exist, but what’s the best clinical model?’”
