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In the United States, 49% of youth with diagnosed psychiatric conditions do not have access to mental healthcare.
Yet in North Carolina, that number rises to 72%, says Dr. Sy Atezaz Saeed, founder and executive director of the Center for Telepsychiatry and e-Behavioral Health at East Carolina University.
The center was built to surface unrecognized or unaddressed childhood mental health diagnoses and bridge the gap between primary care and specialized psychiatric services. At the upcoming 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition, Saeed will present findings from a collaborative care program that is reaching children who would otherwise slip through the cracks of rural healthcare delivery.
"Our main goal is to use this information and the data generated from the program to inform policymakers and show them that approaches like this are cost-effective and efficient," he said.
Catching cases, eliminating delays
Two years into the three-year United Health grant-funded program, the center's researchers have found and improved mental healthcare access for about 1,000 children with clinical anxiety or depression that otherwise would not have been diagnosed, Saeed said.
"They were not coming to the clinic because they had a psychiatric condition," he told Healthcare IT News.
Of those children, about 300 were seen by the child psychiatrist for either a complex disorder or medication.
Children in North Carolina in need of mental health evaluations have long waiting times – typically six months from referral.
To date, the Center for Telepsychiatry and e-Behavioral Health's program has screened 44,000 children, though Saeed will present findings from 34,000 screenings and the 1,000 diagnosed cases of youth and adolescent anxiety and depression.
Screenings for anxiety and depression through the program took place during primary care visits at five or six clinics in the state's Tier One or Tier Two rural counties. Each of the selected practices has an embedded master-level clinical social worker or master-level psychologist to meet with the children and adolescents who are in need of further investigation.
The idea is to cast "a very wide net," Saeed said. "You engage a lot more people."
While some rural children's screenings indicate that they need care, not all have a formal mental health diagnosis.
"For example, in our screenings, we found about 15% of the children scored positive on one of the [indicators], meaning there's a high probability they have a psychiatric disorder," he said. "About 18% screen positive for anxiety, meaning that there's a high probability they have an anxiety disorder."
Building virtual connections
Once children are diagnosed, technology can enhance access to care, "especially for disorders that are common, underdiagnosed and under-treated," Saeed explained.
The first deployment was using telepsychiatry to bring in child psychiatrists, who are scarce, he added.
"So they see patients, as well as connect with a team, and supervise the [embedded] master-level clinicians all using telepsych," he said.
Technology also provides adolescent rural mental health patients with education and support on platforms children use. Virtual reality designed for kids by kids through the program extends healing.
"We decided to actually use virtual reality to build a virtual community house where a child can go and play," said Saeed. "As they go in and play, they are learning about things and getting peer support because there are others who are playing in there as well.
"To build it, children entered a competition to propose what the community house should look like," he continued. Then, 10 winning proposal teams presented their concepts.
The resulting virtual community house, NC Kids Get Well, on the Roblox platform, is accessible to program clinicians for monitoring for emerging issues.
Measuring efficacy, patient satisfaction
The program's artificial intelligence-driven knowledge management system and study registry use OpenAI's GPT to help make sense of all the data points collected.
While the top three most common adolescent mental health diagnoses – attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety and depression, in that order – were not surprising, "now we have data supporting this," Saeed said.
To provide further education for family members and children about the common disorders, the center produced three educational videos that are now embedded in the virtual community hubs.
The AI helped with scripts, which were then reviewed by clinical experts, as well as the avatars from Heygen and synthetic voices from Eleven Labs for the new patient and family education videos.
The AI system also tracked 14 satisfaction metrics per patient and family, spanning cultural sensitivity factors, the engagement of parents or guardians in patient care, accessibility to mental healthcare and the effectiveness of care provided.
Currently, the program's participant satisfaction is 4.63 out of 5, said Saeed.
"We're increasing family engagement and children's mental healthcare, identifying what are the most common diagnosed illnesses, and what works and doesn't work," he added.
But most importantly, for the adolescent rural patients attending the program's participating clinics, access was not an obstacle to care.
"The same child who otherwise may have waited six months to see a child psychiatrist is seen by a child psychiatrist in the same week," said Saeed. "In none of the cases was it more than a month."
Dr. Sy Atezaz Saeed's session, "Technology to Enhance Access to Youth Mental Healthcare," is scheduled for Wednesday, March 11, from 9:45-10:45 a.m., in Palazzo L, Level 5 at the Venetian at HIMSS26 in Las Vegas.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
