Over the past decade, we have been working with a variety of stakeholders in Pennsylvania to expand behavioral health support to children & youth, including the Pennsylvania Office of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (OMHSAS), Drexel University’s Center for Family Intervention Science (CFIS), and Thomas Jefferson University. Through multiple partnerships, grants, and initiatives, BH-Works has been used to screen over 100,000 individuals across 65% of PA counties, identifying more than 4,600 youth who were experiencing suicidal thoughts at the time of screening.
We are happy to announce a continued partnership with the state, providing this same suicide prevention model to Pennsylvania adults. Based on lessons learned from targeted county-level efforts, this new project seeks to build a comprehensive and sustainable statewide model for continuity of care. Using strategies developed for the state Garrett Lee Smith (GLS) Suicide Prevention Grant, the project team will increase provider capacity to screen, assess, manage, and treat adults at-risk for suicide. The project also seeks to improve communication between county crisis response teams and other systems to strengthen care transitions for at-risk adults.
BH-Works will serve three important roles for the project: 1) It functions as a care delivery tool for partnered service providers, helping to identify and provide support to people with behavioral health issues; 2) It serves as a centralized data hub to collect and track population data on behavioral health and other risk factors; and 3) It functions as a project management tool to evaluate program activities and outcomes.
Learn how BH-Works can be used by state and local agencies.