Evaluating the pediatric mental health care continuum at an American health system.

To describe trends in the pediatric mental health care continuum and identify potential gaps in care coordination. We used electronic medical record data from October 2016 to September 2019 to characterize the prevalence of mental health issues in the pediatric population at a large American health system. This was a single institution case study. From the electronic medical record data, primary mental health discharge and readmission diagnoses were identified using Major depressive disorder and other mood disorders comprised 49.6% and 89.4% of diagnoses in the emergency department and inpatient settings respectively compared to 9.0% of ambulatory care diagnoses and were among top reasons for readmission. Additionally, only 1% of all ambulatory care encounters had a care navigation component, whereas 86% of care navigation encounters were for mental health-associated reasons. Major depressive disorder and other mood disorders were more common diagnoses in the emergency department and inpatient settings, which could signal gaps in care coordination. Bridging potential gaps in care coordination could reduce emergency department and inpatient utilization through increasing ambulatory care navigation resources, improving training, and restructuring financial incentives to facilitate ambulatory care diagnosis and management of major depressive disorder and mood disorders. Furthermore, health systems can use our descriptive analytic approach to serve as a reasonable measure of the current state of pediatric mental health care in their own patient population.

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© The Author(s) 2023.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

The author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: NK has a potential conflict of interest of serving as 1) Consulting Methodologist at the University of North Carolina, Sheps Center for Health Policy, Chapel Hill, NC and 2) Consulting Research Statistician at Stanford University, Center for Population Health Sciences, Stanford, CA. The remaining authors have declared that they have no competing or potential conflicts of interest.