Brown County Maternal & Child Mental Health

Identifying and addressing behavioral health concerns in Brown County children

Full Project Name:Maternal/Child Mental Health: Identifying & addressing root causes of behavioral concerns in childrenPrimary Community Organization:Brown County United WayPrimary Academic Partner:John Meurer, MD, MBA, Institute for Health and EquityAward Amount:$191,044

Award Date

January2016

Project Duration:30 months

Project Summary:

The prevalence of serious social and emotional disturbances among children, youth and parents is a priority issue in Brown County. Without early diagnosis and treatment in children, this can interfere with healthy development and continue into adulthood. Project partners sought to established uniform maternal mental health and child social-emotional and developmental screening processes among the major health care systems in order to increase identification of potential issues and appropriately refer children and families for services.

Community partners: Achieve Brown County, Bellin Health System, Prevea Health, Hospital Sisters Health System, Aurora BayCare, Beyond Health Collaborative Steering Committee, Brown County Mental Health Task Force, Brown County Community Information System Leadership Team, Connections for Mental Wellness

Outcomes & Lessons Learned:

Hosted community forum to build awareness and identify opportunities and challenges
Hosted ASQ trainings and mini-summits involving all health care systems and additional community partners serving mothers with young children
Secured agreement from all health care systems to uniform screening of young children at regular intervals at well child visits
Implemented a Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) to all mothers to screen for depression
Improved information sharing among health care organizations, identifying agreement among all health care systems on initial performance indicators to track screenings, including completion rate. Developed a Community Information System to track indicators and identified action steps to expand key performance indicators
Documented a 10% increased referral rate to the Birth to Three program in the final year, meaning more children could receive services which may improve reaching developmental milestones
Project partners leveraged over $90,000
Project partners have been invited to numerous state and regional conferences to present their approach and findings