Staff at Hotel-Dieu Grace Health Care are seeking to make mental health services more accessible to Windsor's youth.
The organization has been working with its partners to develop a central information system for children with mental health conditions.
The system will contain information about the child's mental health diagnosis, his or her story and a recovery plan.
Health care providers' community partners will be able to access patient information to determine which organizations would offer the best individualized treatment options.
The service will also allow patients' files to be transferable to other health care providers, should the patient move away.
Hotel-Dieu's representative, Mary Broga, says the new system will simplify the process of finding appropriate treatment options for children with mental health conditions.
She says a lot of progress has been made in recent years to increase the efficiency of child referral and treatment processes.
"They are not spending a lot of time knocking on the door, sitting on the waiting list just to find out that is not the appropriate service because providers are talking together and are really identifying what their target populations are," says Broga. "So we are really helping families get to the right service and we are really going to make that even better with the central access system."
She says the centralized structure will function in a way comparable to the OHIP health record system.
"We can start on each referral an identifier so that we can get it to the right core provider," says Broga. "They can do their work and do all the information that is necessary. If that child or youth has to move to another provider, that information can go with that child or youth and they do not have to keep telling their story."
She says the system is in its trial phase.
"We just got the actual platform installed," says Broga. "The vendor was selected, the project is now being installed and tested so we hope to have our procedures in place hopefully by this fiscal year."
Broga says patient information will only be shared with appropriate authorization so as to protect patients' privacy rights.