The growing need for child and adolescent mental health services has increased demand for programs and for clinicians, creating an urgent need for more multi-factorial assessment tools.
After several years of planning and testing, McLean Hospital is proud to share the launch of the Child and Adolescent Routine Evaluation (CARE) initiative, a new standard assessment, resulting in a better, more comprehensive evaluation for all patients.
“The ability through the CARE initiative to combine the art of clinical care with the science of the assessment will enable our clinicians to more effectively identify the needs of our patients in a timely way and offer the appropriate interventions,” said Daniel P. Dickstein, MD, FAAP, chief, Simches Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, McLean Hospital.
“We are proud to have McLean be the first to bring this assessment across all of our child/adolescent programs in the country and are confident this will become a pillar for a new standard of care in our field.”
This combination of standard assessments to augment and improve clinical care is known as “measurement-based care.” Launched after 18 months of planning, CARE is the first child hospital-wide measurement-based initiative in the United States.
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The tool combines standardized child (about self) and parent (about their child) questionnaires about common topics relevant to child mental health, including autism, ADHD, mood/anxiety/behavioral problems, trauma/early life stress, sleep, substance use, discrimination/bias, family functioning, and others.
CARE also harnesses the gold-standard assessment for suicide and self-injury (known as the Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors Interview). When all of an individual patient’s CARE assessments are complete, a summary of results—indicating what was in or out of range by topic—is included in their electronic medical record, which can fast track information sharing for clinicians.
The CARE initiative is already having an impact, as more than 1,000 individual patients have completed their CARE assessments. Since its launch, clinicians and individual programs have been using CARE data to better understand who they are helping, and how they can improve.
With support from the Rite Aid Healthy Futures Foundation, CARE measures have been translated into Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Brazilian Portuguese.
