Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Sep 28, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 1, 2018 - Nov 14, 2018
Date Accepted: Mar 1, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
The H3 Tracker: A Clinical Care Monitoring and Data Collection Tool to Evaluate Two Integrated Pediatric Care Models
ABSTRACT
Background:
National recommendations for pediatric integrated care models include improved capacity for care coordination and communication across primary care and specialty mental health providers using technology-enabled interventions, yet few practical, short term solutions are available for low-resource, community based pediatric integrated care clinics.
Objective:
To describe the development of a web-based tool for clinical monitoring of embedded pediatric mental health care using a community partnered approach and its features. In addition, to assess the feasibility of the tool for clinical monitoring and data collection for program evaluation using a longitudinal study design.
Methods:
Using a participatory framework, bi-weekly meetings of the partnered evaluation team (clinic, academic, Foundation partners) were convened over the course of 12 months to specify tool features, followed by usability testing and further refinement during implementation.
Results:
A data collection tool was developed to collect clinic population characteristics as well as collect and display patient mental health outcomes and 1,114 clinical care services from 277 eligible caregiver/child participants. Despite outreach, there was little uptake of the tool by either the behavioral health team or primary care provider.
Conclusions:
Use of the Tracker in two community-based pediatric clinics with embedded mental health teams serving predominantly minority children is feasible and promising for on-site program evaluation data collection. Systems such as the one discussed here could be an important bridge to promoting communication across pediatric primary care providers and a mental health team while the hurdles associated with full-scale integration are resolved. However, clinician engagement with the tool proved challenging. Future research is needed to understand ways to improve clinic integration and promote communication across pediatric primary care providers and an embedded mental health team. Clinical Trial: NCT02699814
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.