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.  [Becker's Behavioral Health]

“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.

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