Amber Childs, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry, has been selected as an awardee for a Yale New Haven Health (YNHHS) Innovation Award.
Childs who was selected as a finalist among a group of competitive applications, delivered a five-minute focused pitch to a panel of investors and strategists for M-Select, a digital tool that assists providers with standardized behavioral health measurements to improve the quality of patient care, simplify ongoing accreditation requirements, and create new revenue potential through measurement-based care (MBC) reimbursement.
Pitch track submissions like Childs’ were chosen for their promise to be commercially viable.
MBC is a patient-centered practice and is intended to empower patients to make care decisions collaboratively with their providers. It uses patient-reported data to guide decision making throughout treatment.
Childs said that with MBC, people drop out of care less, get better faster, and improve more. M-Select is a conceptual innovation for a tool to provide measurement selection guidance and MBC education to providers and is designed to be seamlessly integrated into usual practice.
It uses an algorithmic approach to help providers identify the right measure, for the right patient, for the right issue. Then it gives education and decision-making support on how to use the measure for MBC.
This comprehensive solution would also be bidirectionally integrated with electronic health records to provide documentation support, as well as patient MBC education in the future.
With these seed funds, Childs will develop and pilot M-Select and will be working in collaboration with Yale Ventures to determine commercial viability of the product.
The YNHHS Innovation Awards are sponsored by the YNHHS Center for Health Care Innovation (CHI), established in 2019 as a joint initiative between YNHHS and Yale University. CHI champions innovation and leads the implementation of novel solutions to improve healthcare delivery.
The awards seek to provide needed resources to YNHHS employees and Yale faculty working on promising ideas with potential for impact.