Abstract
Public-academic partnership-based program evaluations can generate actionable evidence for policymaking, program design and implementation in improving school-based mental health service delivery. The University of Pennsylvania Center for Mental Health and public behavioral health care agencies in Philadelphia in the United States have evaluated Philadelphia’s school mental health programs reimbursable through Medicaid billing since 2008. The variety of evaluations include (1) examining acute mental health service use of children receiving school-based mental health care and Medicaid expenditure, (2) examining children’s externalizing and internalizing behaviors to measure school mental health providers’ performance, and (3) examining effects of different types of school mental health programs on children’s behavioral health functioning, school outcomes, and other out-of-school service use. This paper reports key findings of these evaluations, discusses how programs have been refined based on evaluation results, and shares lessons learned for successful public-academic partnership-based evaluations to promote use of actionable evidence.
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Funding
This work is supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) through an award to Dr. Wolk [grant number 1 R18 HS026862-01A1] and was supported in part by Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services. The findings and conclusions presented in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Behavioral Health and disAbility Services.
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CK, AK and CW conceptualized the paper. CK and GK conducted document review and interpretation. CK and AK wrote the first and subsequent drafts of the manuscript. CW, AP and TW contributed to the manuscript writing.
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Kang-Yi, C.D., Kuriyan, A., Kinkler, G. et al. Generating Actionable Evidence for School-Based Mental Health Service Delivery: Public-Academic Partnership Based Evaluations. Community Ment Health J 59, 1588–1600 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-023-01147-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-023-01147-5