There is an Alexa device in every clinic room at the pediatric health system. The original intent behind the devices was to help family members who could not be at their children’s appointments in person join remotely, chief innovation officer David Higginson told Becker’s. The device is relatively inexpensive, at $79, Mr. Higginson said, and requires little IT support.
“That’s where we initially started, and it grew to bringing other people into conversation in the room,” Mr. Higginson said. “That’s how we went down this path with behavioral health.”
Phoenix Children’s has implemented universal screening for depression risk across its specialties, Carla Allan, PhD, division chief of psychology at the system, told Becker’s. Before a visit, parents receive a link to a screening for their child to complete.
If the survey identifies a patient is at acute or nonacute risk of suicide, trained clinicians are able to join the patient’s medical appointment through the Alexa device, regardless of where the clinician is based.
“This platform allows us to scale and serve our mission as the state’s only pediatric health system, and to implement behavioral health into all of our medical specialty clinics,” Dr. Allan said. “For some kids, at high levels of medical complexity, who are already at risk for suicidality, our specialists are their primary care.”
Licensed mental-health therapists are able to review screening results through a central dashboard and prepare to meet patients in need of help before their visit, Mr. Higginson said.
A warm handoff between the patients’ primary provider and the mental health clinician is key, Mr. Higginson said, and the simplicity of the Alexa device makes the transition easier.
“We’ve found that a warm handoff is very important,” he said. “Effectively, we’re using the Zoom client on Alexa to do that warm handoff. It’s very simplistic. As the reach expands, we can’t have something that takes 50 clicks to get to and fails all the time.”
Phoenix Children’s has completed 80,000 suicide risk screenings since launching the program in 2023, Dr. Allan said. A small number, about 0.01%, were identified as having an acute risk for suicide through the screening, and around 5% screened as having a nonacute risk.
That equates to around 4,000 kids who would not have been treated without the screening program, Mr. Higginson said.
The clinicians joining already scheduled appointments when patients are identified as at-risk of suicide are able to provide six to eight follow-up sessions with patients using the collaborative assessment and management of suicidality model, Dr. Allan said.
The clinicians also work to make sure parents are equipped to reduce access to means of suicide in their homes, Dr. Allan said. The system sends means reduction kits to families via mail, which can include safe storage for firearms and medication lockboxes.
There have been a number of success stories from the program, Dr. Allan said.
“When you can help kids think differently about their lives and their challenges earlier, you’re setting them up for success for the rest of their lives,” she said. “Suicide no longer becomes the the option, the thing they think about, to be able to deal with the things that are hard.”
