Family Medical Center of Michigan Reaches more Youth with Tickit

Solution

FMC deploys Tickit’s empathetic screening assessments.

Family Medical Center of Michigan Reaches more Youth with Tickit: The Family Medical Center of Michigan deployed two Tickit solutions: Check Yourself™ and Here to Help, Let’s Connect™ with Digital Empathy.

Check Yourself is a child and youth friendly digital assessment that screens for risk behaviors using a HEADSS framework (home, education, activities/employment, drugs, suicidality, and sexual health). It then compares students’ self-reported behaviors—for example, number of hours slept per night, or amount of alcohol consumed per month—with national averages. It’s designed to be completed before a medical check-up: The clinician receives a streamlined summary based on the Tickit dashboard, which flags behaviours as low-, moderate-, or high-risk. It then encourages counseling for high- and moderate-risk behaviours, supporting clinicians in their care decisions.

Here to Help, Let’s Connect helps identify key stressors in students’ lives by enabling them to anonymously answer questions covering areas such as mental health, substance abuse, food security, economic and housing stability, and racial equity. The tool then responds with a relevant local resources to help address the issues raised.

Results

High response rates; high-risk students are flagged

While the schools were initially slow to deploy the tools to students due to competing priorities, it was clear that Tickit was able to identify students who were experiencing issues but were not verbalizing or sharing them previously via interview or questionnaires. Based on this, deployment accelerated —in the case of the first Check Yourself deployment, for example—the volume of submissions steadily climbed in subsequent rollouts.

“We found there were students who the FMC staff were engaged in therapy with, but there were more concerns that the student had not brought up in counseling sessions that were identified in the Tickit Check Yourself tool,” says Audrey Smith. “FMC and school staff were also surprised to identify students who were not the most vocal but had significant concerns which needed immediate attention.”

The in-depth information Check Yourself yielded on issues such as depression, anxiety, and substance abuse enabled FMC and school staff to accurately triage students and provide targeted referrals addressing the specific nature of the responses.

The Here To Help assessment conducted in late 2020 garnered a 50 percent response rate—considered best in class by most survey standards. Based on the 831 responses that Here to Help elicited from students in grades 7-12, FMC sent the students self-management resources that were then supplemented by follow-up from school and FMC staff.

The Tickit findings have also helped the schools and FMC create and implement educational materials on topics directly related to the needs of the students such as safety and substance use, rather than based on speculation of what they need.

Tickit’s flagging system was especially valuable in calling out the significantly higher number of high school students needing immediate support, compared with middle school students.

Smith also points to the overall emotional benefits gained by students knowing the Tickit tools are there to help them.

“We found that the Tickit survey demonstrated to students that the school cares about their educational, physical health, mental health and developmental health and is willing to bring resources into the school to support the student in a safe and comfortable environment.”