Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton speaks to reporters and advocates at a information convention saying a brand new unified portal for little one behavioral well being applications on Jan. 29, 2024. (Capitol News Illinois)

For years, mother and father and suppliers have criticized what they see as a disorganized system for locating youngsters psychological well being care in Illinois. State leaders are hoping a brand new partnership will change that.

The Illinois Department of Human Services is partnering with Google to launch a brand new centralized portal for kids’s psychological well being care, state officers introduced Monday.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker, executives from Google Public Sector and state legislators gathered at Google’s Fulton Market workplace in Chicago to announce that the portal, referred to as BEACON, is slated to launch this summer season. The governor stated a centralized hub will make discovering behavioral well being assets a lot simpler for folks and suppliers.

“If you’ve ever had to search for these resources, it’s difficult,” Pritzker stated.

Beyond a central location to see what state businesses present care, mother and father can “upload documents to avoid repetition when applying for all these services,” he stated.

The platform might be accessible to folks, related well being care suppliers and educators to watch what providers youngsters could also be eligible for from the state.

BEACON is the most recent main undertaking following final 12 months’s Blueprint for Transformation, an govt report on youngsters’s psychological well being care commissioned by Gov. Pritzker’s Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative. 

That report highlighted 5 options for enhancing little one psychological well being care:

• Adjust capability of providers
• Streamline processes of providers 
• Intervene earlier
• Increase accountability so there’s transparency in providers
• Develop agility to extend system responsiveness

Dana Weiner, lead writer of the report and Chief Officer for the initiative, highlighted BEACON as a “state of the art tool” that can ease the logistical and emotional burden related to searching for psychological well being care.

“Families that previously had to navigate multiple paths telling the story of their youth’s challenges dozens of times in the hope that a door to services would open now will have an option for a single centralized place to go for help,” Weiner stated.

The initiative was launched in 2022 amid concern concerning the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Illinois youth, a sentiment Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton echoed on Monday.

“The last few years have been harder than anything that I’ve seen in my lifetime. The pandemic ripped away normalcy,” she stated. “Understandably, we’ve seen a surge of mental health struggles in our youngest community members.”

IDHS’ Division of Mental Health contracted with Google Public Sector — a division throughout the tech large that companions with governments and universities — to develop BEACON. Officials stated the portal will be capable of join caregivers with the myriad well being assets supplied by an array of state businesses together with, however not restricted to, the Department of Children and Family Services, the Department of Human Services, and the Department of Healthcare and Family Services.

“In this age of technology, we have enormous power at our fingertips, and we are using it to nurture our children and create a healing-centered Illinois,” Stratton stated. “The BEACON portal will centralize and simplify the process of securing mental and behavioral health intervention. It will ease the burden on our care providers.”

State Rep. Lindsey LaPointe (D-Chicago), a former social employee and chair of the House Mental Health and Addiction committee, stated BEACON is an indication of progress within the state’s psychological well being system.

“If you’ve lived it, like many of us have, you know that nothing about the mental health care system is easy to navigate,” she stated. “Things have gotten a whole lot better. We still have lots of hill to climb when it comes to children’s behavioral health access.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan information service masking state authorities. It is distributed to a whole lot of newspapers, radio and TV stations statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, together with main contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association.