According to a study published in Academic Pediatrics. The findings suggest that the program – called Mood, Anxiety, ADHD Collaborative Care (MAACC) – is successfully preparing pediatricians to manage these conditions independently so that more children can access care despite the ongoing shortage of pediatric mental health professionals.
Our study shows that educating pediatricians through collaborative care builds their capacity to self-manage mental health conditions, which translates into exponentially greater access for children.”
John Parkhurst, PhD, senior author, Director of Collaborative Care Psychology at Lurie Children’s and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
The MAACC program began in 2018 and currently serves 57 pediatric primary care practices with over 350 participating pediatricians. Pediatricians at MAACC completed training consisting of a 12-unit curriculum and monthly mock case presentations. After training, they could refer patients for multidisciplinary evaluation and come up with a treatment plan. Pediatricians also had access to consultation with child psychologists or psychiatrists at Lurie Children’s as needed.
For the study, Dr. Parkhurst and colleagues used electronic health record data, excluding patients directly served by the MAACC, to assess pediatrician-attributed mental health diagnoses, drug prescriptions, and frequency of follow-up visits in two groups: pediatricians participating in the MAACC (four practices, 16 providers) and pediatricians without a plan of care. 15 providers). Data were analyzed for one reference year (July 1, 2017-June 30, 2018) and the first four years of MAACC implementation (July 1, 2018-June 30, 2022).
“We found that experience with MAACC had a significant impact on pediatricians’ behavior. Even when year-to-year changes were taken into account, pediatricians exposed to MAACC were more than twice as likely to identify patients with anxiety or depression and nearly three times more likely to see those patients for follow-up. Among diagnosed patients, antidepressant prescribing was approximately 20%. Parkhurst. “These findings confirm that our program is producing the intended results – transferring the necessary knowledge and skills to paediatricians so that common mental health conditions in children can be treated in primary care.”
This research was additionally supported by the Pritzker Foundation.
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