Bring the Kids Home: Youth Mental Healthcare in Rural Alaska

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Bring the Kids Home Home and Community Based Outpatient Pilot Program (BTKH) was a joint initiative by the State of Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority (AMHTA) and the Department of Behavioral Health (DBH) to address the problem that the number of youth entering out-of-state Residential Psychiatric Treatment Centers (RPTC) and the amount of Medicaid funding supporting this treatment significantly increased between 1998 and 2004. The State developed a logic-model based plan to: decrease the numbers of out of state RPTC youth; provide outpatient programs and residential treatment providers in state to treat the youth as close to home as possible at the least restrictive level that is appropriate; increase youth and family involvement in client support and policy development; and manage the flow of youth to in-state programs whenever possible. The evaluation of the Alaska Bring the Kids Home (BTKH) pilot programs involved collecting and analyzing client- (i.e., Medicaid and youth outcome measures) and program-specific secondary data (from program sites) related to these pilot programs. A comparison of BTKH program youth to a matched random sample of comparison youth found that the BTKH program produced comparable outcomes to youth typically served in remote treatment facilities.