Evaluating Innovation: Precision Mental Health

Article at Archive of Clinical Neuropsychology

🎯 Only 50% of children and youth with mental health disorders respond to treatment. 

📊 In this article, my co-authors at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario and I discuss the potential that precision mental health holds to improve these odds. We describe an innovative care pathway—designed within a mental health outpatient clinic— to allow for neuropsychology data to be integrated in psychotherapeutic care. 

🧠Neurological assessment-simply put— provides valuable data about our brains function. If data about individual brain function is not incorporated into treatment plans, children and youth may receive treatments that are poorly matched to their unique neuropsychological strengths and challenges, which can increase the risk of sub-optimal outcomes.

🔄 Implications: We evaluated the feasibility of this new pathway using a developmental evaluation approach. How the care pathway was designed, implemented and evaluated could be useful for those who wish to build a similar neuropsychology-informed care pathway for precision child and youth outpatient mental health care.