PRESENTATION

Beyond Brick and Mortar: Leveraging Technology to Expand the Reach and Scope of Children’s Behavioral Health Care

Friday, December 5 | 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM

Children’s behavioral health problems impose a staggering public health burden, yet most affected youth do not receive care. Systematic barriers interfere with the availability, accessibility, and acceptability of services. The past fifteen years have witnessed a sharp uptick in clinical innovations drawing on technology to extend care reach, and the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a telehealth transition that constituted one of the field’s most sweeping and abrupt practice transformations in history. Given surging behavioral health needs and limited access to traditional office-based care, telehealth and other digital technologies have launched into the clinical mainstream. Against this backdrop, Dr. Comer—one of the field’s leading authorities on leveraging technology for children’s behavioral healthcare—will present an overview of modernized clinical strategies and their evidence. Dr. Comer will present the state-of-the-science on telehealth-delivered care and will review research suggesting telehealth can even outperform traditional office-based care when applied correctly. Dr. Comer will also summarize evidence on self-administered computerized treatments and digital therapeutics that respond to growing client preferences for mobile formats and self-guided care. These strategies increasingly draw on machine learning and artificial intelligence to offer hyper-responsive, smart interventions that offer real-time support in moments and settings of greatest need. Dr. Comer will compare the effectiveness and feasibility of these technology-based formats, and he will outline obstacles currently restricting their broad uptake. His address will conclude with a recommended agenda and strategic vision for guiding the future of youth behavioral healthcare and for optimizing the public health impact of modernized, technology-based care options.

Learning Objectives: 

• Evaluate how various technologies can be leveraged to overcome systematic barriers to youth behavioral healthcare.
• Compare research on the effectiveness and consumer satisfaction of traditional office-based care versus major technology-based treatment options. 
• Assess the benefits and drawbacks associated with various technology-based treatment options (i.e., telehealth care, self-administered computerized/online treatments, and just-in-time adaptive interventions that draw on passive sensing and AI).
• Understand critical procedural, technical, ethical, and practical matters that must be considered when incorporating technology-based methods into practice.

About the Presenter

Jonathan Comer, PhD, is one of the field’s leading authorities on technology-based youth mental healthcare, Dr. Comer leads a funded research program examining innovative and nontraditional strategies for expanding the reach, scope, and responsiveness of behavioral health services. Dr. Comer is Professor of Psychology at Florida International University where he directs the NIH-funded Mental health Interventions & Novel Therapeutics (MINT) Program and the SAMHSA-funded Network for Enhancing Wellness in Disaster-Affected Youth (NEW DAY). His work has also been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). His research and scholarship focus on digital mental health, telehealth, intensive formats, family-based care, and just-in-time adaptive interventions using passive sensing and AI. Clinically, his work primarily addresses anxiety problems, traumatic stress, emotion dysregulation, irritability, and/or behavioral challenges in youth. He’s written over 250 scholarly publications, serves as Editor-in-Chief of Behavior Therapy, is past-president of the Society of Clinical Psychology (APA Division12), and chairs the semi-annual Miami International Child and Adolescent Mental Health (MICAMH) Conference. He has also coauthored several textbooks, including Psychopathology: Science and Practice and Fundamentals of Psychopathology.