Center for Team Effectiveness to Accelerate EBP Implementation in Children's Mental Health Services

PROJECT SUMMARY (Overall) The proposed “Center for Team Effectiveness to Accelerate EBP Implementation in Children’s Mental Health Services (TEAMS)” will leverage organizational team effectiveness research (TER) to develop and test novel team-based implementation strategies, methods, and tools to improve the reach, quality, and effectiveness of care delivered in public systems serving children with mental health needs - specialty mental health, schools, pediatric healthcare, and child welfare. Gaps between evidence-based practices (EBPs) and routine care persist and limit the quality and effectiveness of services for children. High performing implementation teams are essential to effective services and team-level mechanisms can hinder or facilitate EBP implementation. There is substantial research on team development interventions developed for the military, business, and other complex contexts, but they not been leveraged to improve children’s mental health. The TEAMS Center will create the essential administrative and scientific infrastructure to conduct team-based implementation research to improve children’s mental health outcomes. It will bring together experts in children’s mental health implementation research, EBPs for children and adolescents, implementation strategies, models, and methods, TER, and computer science. We propose to: (1) establish a highly efficient and well-functioning Center for community-partnered children’s mental health implementation research; (2) integrate TER and natural language processing to advance implementation science models, designs, and measures; and (3) leverage the Center’s expertise and infrastructure to design, build, and test team-based strategies to improve the implementation and effectiveness of EBPs across service systems. The Administrative Core will apply TER strategies to Center operations to optimize communication and decision-making; foster interdisciplinary collaboration and partnership with community stakeholders; and promote the development of internal and external trainees. The Methods Core will advance implementation science models to incorporate TER and natural language processing, adapt and develop measures to examine team-based implementation strategies and mechanisms, and clinical/service outcomes. Center research will adapt and test team development interventions selected from those with evidence in other contexts. The Signature R01 will test a combination of team development interventions [e.g., communication training via handoff protocols, team performance monitoring] to improve implementation and effectiveness of the Collaborative Life Skills Program for children with ADHD in schools. The developmental projects will test after-action reviews to improve shared decision making regarding mental health services in child and family teams in Child Welfare Services (R34#1); implementation team charters to improve distance training for two autism EBPs in specialty mental health and schools (R34#2); and team communication training to facilitate depression screening in a pediatric health care system (R34#3). Additionally, the Center will solicit and fund two pilot projects per year led by internal and external teams of investigators and community partners.