Kim Secures Grant to Advance Children's Mental Health Systems in Texas

Assistant Professor Youngran Kim, PhD, was awarded a two-year $499,570 grant to evaluate the clinical effectiveness and program impacts associated with the mental health program, “Youth Empowerment Services (YES)”, designed for children and adolescents with complex needs and multi-system involvement. The funding also encourages the development of junior researchers starting their scientific careers in Texas. This grant is part of an over $8.3 million initiative by the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium to improve children’s mental health across the state. Additionally, UTHealth Houston researchers have received $1.2 million under the New and Emerging Children’s Mental Health Research initiative to advance evidence-based childhood mental illness prevention and treatment.

Kim will lead the study “Evaluating Texas’ Youth Empowerment Services (YES) program,” which supports children with severe emotional disturbance (SED) at high risk of psychiatric hospitalization. The YES program, funded by a Medicaid waiver, serves children aged 3 to 18 who are at risk of displacement and provides home and community-based mental health services to improve care and overall health for youth who face mental, emotional, and behavioral difficulties.

“Medicaid is a major source of funding for mental health services for children in Texas,” said Kim with the Department of Management, Policy, and Community Health. “After the successful completion of this study, we plan to expand our research to evaluate similar Medicaid programs that provide mental health services for children and adolescents with complex needs and multi-system involvement.”

Since its inception, the program has been a crucial resource for many families of children with SED in Texas, offering access to family-based interventions, specialized therapy, and community living support.

“We hope that evaluating the YES program to examine its effectiveness and to explore factors related to positive program outcomes help shape future policies and funding to better support children with SED and their families,” Kim said.

Findings from the evaluation will provide needed information for families that have children with SED and support evidence-based decision making among state administrators and policymakers . Evaluation studies like this are essential in analyzing the outcomes of participants to tailor future expansions and provide evidence-based research to implement in future programs across health systems.

Kim and the team will partner with UTHealth Houston School of Public Health’s Center for Health Care Data, which will aid in the analysis of program impacts, challenges, and opportunities for improvement. Additional UTHealth Houston researchers on the grant include Co-PI, Jack Tsai, PhD, professor and regional dean; Trudy Krause, DrPH, professor and co-founder of the Center for Health Care Data; Taiwo Babatope, MD, MPH, MBA; and Scott Lane, PhD.