Thrive Health partners with Northwest Prevention Science to develop and deliver the Family Check-Up® Online Program (FCO)

Thrive Health and Northwest Prevention Science (NPS) have partnered to develop and deliver the Family Check-Up® Online Program (FCO) using Thrive Health’s patient engagement platform and NPS’s clinical expertise and oversight.

The Family Check-Up® is a brief, strength-based intervention program for families with children ages 2-17 for use in a range of service settings such as schools and community mental health clinics. The Family Check-Up is an evidence-based, preventive approach to mental health and resilience that was designed to support families from all cultural communities. 30 years of research with thousands of families from diverse economic and cultural groups across the U.S. and internationally shows the Family Check-Up:

• Increases use of positive parenting
• Strengthens parent-child relationships
• Reduces family conflict
• Reduces child depression and anxiety
• Reduces parent depression
• Improves school readiness
• Reduces child problem behaviors
• Improves child emotional regulation
• Improves academic achievement
• Improves school attendance
• Decreases child and adolescent substance use through the young adult years

The Family Check-Up® Online Program includes the benefits of the original Family Check-Up in an easy to use, online format for practitioners and parents. Using a HIPAA-compliant web-based application, the FCO includes a back-end administrative system for practitioners and agencies, as well as a parent, web-based application that delivers the intervention asynchronously in an easy-to-use format with engaging activities, videos, and content relevant to parents navigating the challenges of raising children today. Families will be provided with a central hub for accessing the FCO Program, including accessing parenting resources, management of appointments and virtual visits, and the availability of automated recommendations tailored to responses gathered from assessments. 

How does it work? The Family Check-Up® is a strength-based, family centered approach to prevention and intervention that provides support to parents with children who have behavioral health issues such as depression, noncompliance, ADHD, anxiety, and substance use. The Family Check-Up involves assessment, feedback, and intervention support for families with the goal of increasing parenting skills and strengthening family relationships. Intervention support is based on the needs of the family and individualized to family goals. Motivational interviewing is a key feature of the intervention, and is used to support parent strengths and facilitate changes in parent-child interactions. Improvement in parenting skills and family relationships leads to reductions in child behavioral and mental health problems over time.

With this initiative, NPS and Thrive Health intend to partner with organizations delivering care to families and youth such as schools and community health practitioners. Our goal is to support families in communities by increasing access to the FCO. Organizations will benefit by building their capacity to serve children and families.  Providers will benefit from training in the model and a dynamic dashboard to make data-informed decisions about families.  Our ultimate goal is to increase reach and sustained impact of the program to communities, families, and children.

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