The University of Pennsylvania recently announced that researchers from its Perelman School of Medicine will receive $6.4 million in funding from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to develop a mental health center.
“The foundation of this initiative is a three decade-long relationship between the City of Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Penn’s Center for Mental Health Policy and Services Research, which is integral to the success of this work,” said Dr. Rinad Beidas, an assistant professor of Psychiatry and director of Implementation Research, in a statement. “We are grateful for this relationship and are committed to working with our partners to ensure that the findings of this work result in policies that improve care for people with mental illness.”
The mental health center will be led by Beidas and two other principal investigators from the Perelman School of Medicine – Dr. David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry and director of Penn's Center for Mental Health Policy and Services Research, and Dr. Kevin Volpp, the Janet and John Haas President’s Distinguished professor of Medicine, Medical Ethics and Health Policy and director of the Penn Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics.
“One of the major challenges of delivering mental health services effectively and efficiently is to get those who are seeking such services into evidence-based treatment in the community settings where most care is provided,” Volpp said. “This funding will help us to do that and we are very grateful to the National Institute of Mental health for its support. This is especially important because studies show that many forms of treatment with good records of success in clinical trials and practices are seldom implemented successfully in community settings.”
