Contract Open

Mental Health Early Detection Platform

NCER

Program: Small Business Innovation Research

Award amount: $1,000,000

Project director: Narendranath Balasubramaniam

Awardee:

Metamorphix, Inc

Year: 2025

Award period: 2 years (09/12/2025 - 09/11/2027)

Project type:

Direct to Phase II

Contract number: 91990025C0105

Purpose

School mental health screenings are considered a best practice and a key part of youth mental health to identify all students with needs and tailor services to them. Despite the proliferation of many technically adequate social, emotional, and behavioral screening instruments, the prominent barriers to their use include the lack of infrastructure to administer and interpret them; excessive number of students identified in need of services; and the lack of clear connection of screening results to guide interventions and supports.

The project purpose is to build/ integrate the mental health early identification screener developed by Drs. Wendy Reinke and Keith Herman into Metamorphix's Cascades platform as a universal screener alongside student-level academic, attendance, behavior and social determinants and vulnerability data. This will provide school districts the ability to identify at-risk students and refer them to tiered interventions, monitor student progress and improve fidelity and efficacy of seamless tiered supports.

Project Activities

The project team will transform a stand-alone early identification screening tool with limited capability into an enterprise class solution for managing the mental health of K–12 students. The workplan will incorporate the early identification screening capabilities to a whole child intervention platform for universal screening of mental health risks, intervention management and progress monitoring. The project will start off with obtaining user feedback from current users of the stand-alone early identification screening tool to gain insight on usability and workflow enhancements for the new build. Through iterative agile process and sprint schedules, we will develop personal-based user interfaces. Researchers will use a two- phase approach to pilot the product with several schools. Researchers will lead the data analysis to examine if the product functions as intended. Do users understand how to navigate the various components of the product easily? Do users find the product to be useful as an education tool to support students in their building? Are users able to easily integrate the product within their existing practice (i.e., integrate it into problem-solving team meetings) as intended? Do schools using the product demonstrate similar or better student SEB, and academic outcomes in comparison to the standalone early identification screener?