The Science and Engineering team at the Child Mind Institute is dedicated to transforming the lives of children with mental health and learning disorders through the power of scientific discovery.
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Child Mind Institute Presents at 2022 Technology in Psychiatry Summit (TIPS)
December 6, 2022
The Child Mind Institute presented on how we’ve innovated technology-based methods to screen children for mental health disorders.
About TIPS
The Child Mind Institute’s Pediatric Mental Health Screening Assessment (PMHSA) team was proud to have a poster about their initiative selected for presentation at the 2022 Technology in Psychiatry Summit (TIPS). TIPS is an annual conference, sponsored by the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry (ITP), a Harvard Medical School affiliate, brings together a diverse group of thought leaders to look at the promise of technology in the diagnosis and delivery of mental health care, to improve both research and care.
Using Technology to Screen for Mental Health Disorders
Center for the Developing Brain associate research analyst and first author on the poster, Elle Kass, took this opportunity to look at how the PMHSA has innovated technology-based methods to screen children for mental health disorders. The poster first summarized the background of the PMHSA before diving into the nuances of the screener. It explained that the PMHSA is a collaboration between the Child Mind Institute and the Office of the Staten Island Borough President to bring mental health screening to pediatric offices in the New York City borough. The poster highlighted data on both parents’ attitudes toward mental health screening and the range of mental health disorders the screener has detected to date.
The poster also detailed how the screener is administered, noting that the most recent iteration of the screening tool uses the Child Mind Institute MATTER Lab’s MindLogger platform to administer screeners via tablet to children at pediatric visits. It included screenshots of the tool to help readers get a feel for how easy it is for clinicians to administer the screener and for children to complete it.
Additionally, the poster covered the specific benefits of using MindLogger over other online platforms: the high degree of flexibility the platform affords the team when it comes to the variety of assessments and flow of questions, immediate and automatic scoring, and customization of reports. Most importantly, the poster noted, using an online platform to administer the screeners greatly improves the possibility that more children everywhere will get access to screening.
About Our Science
The Center for the Developing Brain is the hub of the Child Mind Institute’s research activity. Bringing together leading scientists and researchers from across disciplines, the Center is at the forefront of neuroscience efforts to find objective biological measures of mental illness in the developing brain.
One of the greatest barriers to reliably improving mental health interventions is the fact that diagnosis and treatment are subjective. We’re leading a global effort to identify objective, measurable brain- and behavior-based biomarkers to guide clinical practice.
MATTER Lab is a research lab within the Child Mind Institute and work with clinicians and patients who inspire and guide the development of our technologies. Our mission is to advance our understanding and care of mental health by building, improving, and deploying technologies for use in therapy, education, and research.
Our team of researchers and engineers brings together expertise across a diverse range of disciplines, enabling the kind of innovative collaborations that speed the pace of discovery.
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Brain Development, Science and Research, Science Programs
