Big Ideas for Solving Complex, Multilevel State Challenges
State children's mental health care authorities, nationwide, face challenges to providing high-quality, evidence-based children's mental health care: delivering care in the face of smaller state budgets, often against significant organizational challenges, and against the backdrop of system-wide health care changes.
For nearly two decades, in close collaboration with Center stakeholders (parents, providers, and policymakers) our Center has helped states to meet some of these EBP implementation challenges to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of state-delivered children's mental health care.
Today, our newly-funded NIMH-funded ALACRITY Center, which retains its IDEAS moniker, is laser-focused on a different, complex, but important challenge: improving the integration of well-established scientific research evidence into the state children's mental health policymaking process.
For nearly two decades, in close collaboration with Center stakeholders (parents, providers, and policymakers) our Center has helped states to meet some of these EBP implementation challenges to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of state-delivered children's mental health care.
Today, our newly-funded NIMH-funded ALACRITY Center, which retains its IDEAS moniker, is laser-focused on a different, complex, but important challenge: improving the integration of well-established scientific research evidence into the state children's mental health policymaking process.
IDEAS Transdisciplinary Research Team
Working collaboratively with researchers from the systems science arena, we are developing tools to assist state policymakers in better integrating scientific evidence into their policymaking processes, and developing tailored dissemination strategies to ensure that state policies reflect the current gold-standard of care.
Collaboration is also key to reaching our second Center goal: developing tools and strategies to help states better care for their most high-need and high cost populations: youth with severe depression visiting emergency departments (ED) for treatment, and youth with first episode psychosis.
Better meeting the needs of these youth and families can only be done by closely collaborating with those who design and deliver care (policymakers and providers), and those most impacted by it, the parents of youth receiving services, and youths themselves. Together, our six leading research universities, from multiple disciplines (i.e. systems science, anthropology, epidemiology, psychology, psychiatry, and emergency medicine), are teaming up to provide better ideas for transforming children's mental health care.
Collaboration is also key to reaching our second Center goal: developing tools and strategies to help states better care for their most high-need and high cost populations: youth with severe depression visiting emergency departments (ED) for treatment, and youth with first episode psychosis.
Better meeting the needs of these youth and families can only be done by closely collaborating with those who design and deliver care (policymakers and providers), and those most impacted by it, the parents of youth receiving services, and youths themselves. Together, our six leading research universities, from multiple disciplines (i.e. systems science, anthropology, epidemiology, psychology, psychiatry, and emergency medicine), are teaming up to provide better ideas for transforming children's mental health care.
For over two decades, our collaborative, multidisciplinary team from the NIMH-funded Developing Center (2007-2011) and Advanced Center (2012-2018), has built the knowledge base on state EBP implementation challenges.
Now, we are switching gears, and sharpening our focus on the complex state policymaking environment in order to better integrate scientific research evidence into the policymaking process. This requires the intense collaborative efforts of systems scientists, ethnographers, policymaking experts, epidemiologists, and parents and providers if we are to improve the integration of research evidence into policymaking.
- Kimberly Hoagwood, PhD
IDEAS Center Co-Director
IDEAS Center Co-Director
Training Opportunities for Researchers
