For the past two years, Extraordinary Options has been working with the leading adolescent mental healthcare providers in our community to gather the data necessary to isolate the most common and egregious barriers to adolescents receiving timely and appropriate mental health support and intervention. The ultimate purpose behind gathering this data is to identify and implement solutions that interdependently and seamlessly connect our community to intervention, support, and services necessary to combat the steady decline in adolescent mental health.
The data collected from this effort is comprised of feedback from a population defined as adolescent mental health providers, including personnel from schools, mental health organizations, and pediatric medical providers in our community, who have identified, from their perspective, the most statistically significant resources necessary to support suicide prevention. The findings are as follows:
Barrier
Most parents, guardians, and people in general, have no idea what types and levels of care exist in the realm of adolescent mental health resources, how to differentiate between them, combine them, use them effectively or how to use their existing insurance benefits to pay for them.
Solution
A comprehensive web and app-based directory, unique from state to state, that identifies every adolescent mental health provider, by type, service, and level of care. The app will allow providers to seamlessly connect to each other and to consumers, will indicate the availability of appointments or openings, and identifies in and out of network insurance affiliation, by provider. Additional functionality could include a cost/visit calculator and VOB (Verification of Benefits) tool.
Barrier
Schools could be the best positioned advocates to intervene in the decline of adolescent mental health, but they lack the resources necessary to participate effectively in sustainable intervention. By default, schools are left navigating the burden of declining student mental health. To date, there is no uniform, systemic, successful solution that provides for consistent, impactful, sustainable, evidence- based intervention in schools and no consistently sustainable resources exist to support such a solution.
Solution
Put schools in a position to incorporate evidenced based, resilience oriented, solution focused skills curriculum into existing areas of academic programming/coursework currently being offered during the school day. Offer/encourage parent-based participation/intervention in the form of a simultaneously offered, credit qualifying parent course, in conjunction with the student course work, to support enterprise level influence and intervention.
Barrier
There is no specific training designed to help providers learn to navigate and mitigate the individual but common barriers that prevent them from providing services to the very community that is trying to participate in them. These challenges include the disconnect between the providers themselves and the communication and collaboration barriers between providers, patients, and the systems designed to support them. Furthermore, most families don’t know how to access/use their existing insurance benefits to identify, connect to, and pay for appropriate adolescent mental healthcare services and don’t have the knowledge necessary to navigate and mediate the insurance obstacles that keep them disconnected from the services they are eligible to tap into. Providers remain ill equipped to communicate effectively with payers, limiting the support the payor is trying to provide.
Solution
Provide channel specific training designed to facilitate transparent solution orientated communication between providers, payors and patients, promote informed decision making and support intentional action. Training oriented solutions will position participants at every level of interaction to mediate the systemic disconnect that continues to separate our community from the resources designed and instituted to serve it.
Barrier
Most families don’t know how to access/use their existing insurance benefits to seamlessly and successfully identify, connect to, and pay for appropriate adolescent mental healthcare services and are ill equipped with the knowledge necessary to navigate and mediate the perceived insurance obstacles that keep them disconnected from the services they are eligible to tap into.
Solution
Bring providers and carriers together to discuss the obstacles that routinely impose barriers to services and mediate, promote and communicate confirmed solutions that effect change. Train providers and carriers to work together to mediate and resolve the obstacles/barriers to providing services to qualified consumers.
Barrier
Community hopelessness continues to rise and is perpetuated by the absence of a sustainable solution equipped with the components necessary to disrupt the consistent decline in adolescent mental health. There remains a persistent disconnect between various front-line providers (educators and traditional mental health providers) and the systems designed to support them. As a result, our community remains unsupported and underserved. Adolescent mental health providers of all types were positioned individually and in theory to provide solutions that could influence our communitywide crisis but their inability to work interdependently relegates them to remain disconnected from the very people they were designed to serve.
Solution
Use public figures as endorsing ambassadors to unite our community in solidarity and purpose; shifting the narrative away from hopelessness and despair; shining a spotlight on a renewed community commitment to awareness for the problems and the action necessary to solve them! Awareness is Awesome but ACTION is EVERYTHING!
