Applying for a HRSA Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training Grant?

The purpose of the Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training (BHWET) Program for Professionals is to grow the behavioral health workforce that serves children, adolescents, and young adults. This 2021 HRSA grant will award up to $480,000 per year for up to four years to a maximum of 92 grantees.
Accredited schools of health professions and training programs establishing or expanding pre-degree clinical internships and field placements for students are eligible to apply. This includes field placement in

• mental health in psychiatry,
• psychology,
• school psychology,
• behavioral pediatrics,
• psychiatric nursing (which may include master’s and doctoral level programs),
• social work,
• school social work,
• SUD prevention and treatment,
• marriage and family therapy,
• occupational therapy, and
• school counseling, or professional counseling, including such programs with a focus on child and adolescent mental health, trauma, and transitional-age youth.

Accredited doctoral, internship, and post-doctoral residency programs of health service psychology (including clinical psychology, counseling, and school psychology) are also eligible, as well as accredited master’s and doctoral degree programs of social work for the development and implementation of interdisciplinary training of social work graduate students for providing behavioral health services, including trauma-informed care and substance use disorder prevention and treatment.

Please refer to the grant web page, Notice of Funding Opportunity, and HRSA TA webinar recording to determine your eligibility. Individuals are not eligible to apply.

Outlined below are ways in which Kognito can support your degree program to address the goals and objectives of the 2021 HRSA grant.

HRSA Grant Activities

To support experiential training, Kognito’s evidence-based behavioral health simulations offer healthcare providers and students hands-on practice leading patient encounters that prepare them for real-life clinical practice.

By harnessing the power of conversations with virtual humans in a safe and versatile digital environment, learners identify patients who may be at risk for a mental health or substance use issue and engage them in a brief intervention to motivate them to pursue appropriate treatment.

Dynamic simulations deliver accredited education in screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT), and demonstrate evidence-based communication skills that increase patient engagement and improve health outcomes in behavioral health encounters.

As a health simulation company that offers online experiential training in behavioral health, Kognito can help fulfill the following objectives of the Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training program:

Enhance didactic and experiential training activities through the development of competencies in primary and behavioral integrated, interprofessional team-based trauma informed care, for trainees, faculty, and staff

Promote technology integration in the provision of services and training programs, including utilizing telehealth services, implementing strategies to increase digital health literacy, and offering options for distance learning

For FY 2021, the BHWET grant funds must support 13 program requirements. The following are requirements in which Kognito simulations can support your training and distance learning efforts:

Relevant Program Requirements

• Establish or expand the number of partnerships with experiential training sites in high need and high demand areas in order to recruit and place trainees in these areas
• Advance the integration of behavioral health training into primary care settings to improve access to quality behavioral health services
• Enhance didactic and experiential training activities that develop trainee competencies in behavioral health as well as its integration into primary care for the development and implementation of interdisciplinary training (i.e. two or more health disciplines)
• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the concerns of the population served, especially individuals with mental disorder symptoms or diagnoses, particularly children and adolescents, and transitional-age youth
• Include technology integration by providing options for distance learning and developing didactic and experiential training activities that address strategies for providing telehealth services and increasing digital health literacy
• Collect specified program and performance data, and disseminate findings to appropriate audiences. Participate in program evaluations during and upon completion of the project period

For grant applicants, we encourage you to read our Kognito HRSA BHWET Grant Applicant Resource Kit that provides more details on how Kognito supports these requirements.

Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training Activities with Kognito’s Behavioral Health Simulations

Kognito has worked with dozens of schools of health professions and healthcare organizations to provide a library of practice scenarios that supplement clinical hours and facilitate distance learning. Our Behavioral Health suite of products address topics like substance use including alcohol and opioids, and mental illness and suicide risk, across both adolescent and adult patient populations. They feature both in-office and telehealth settings.

Over a dozen peer-reviewed studies, and real world results from 75,000+ healthcare providers have empirically proven the efficacy of Kognito’s simulations. A meta-analysis of several studies found that healthcare providers trained with Kognito simulations demonstrated statistically significant increases in preparedness and self-efficacy to apply learned skills two months after being trained. Kognito simulations have also been proven to lead to a 17% average weekly increase in patient screenings, brief interventions, and referrals to treatments per nurse over eight weeks post-training.

The following are Kognito products that are designed for behavioral health patient encounters. For product descriptions, topics, and product length, check out our  HRSA BHWET Grant Applicant Resource Kit.

• SBI with Adolescents – Developed in collaboration with NORC at the University of Chicago
• SBI with Adolescents: Comorbid Substance Use and Mental Health – Developed in collaboration with NORC at the University of Chicago
• Adolescent Suicide Risk
• SBI with Adults
• Medication Misuse and Suicide Risk
• Opioid Use Disorder

If you’d like to experience a product for yourself, you can access free demos on our website or contact us to try a full version. More technical information and FAQs are available in our HRSA BHWET Grant Applicant Resource Kit.

Kognito Client Success

Kognito takes an active role as needed in each step of the implementation process. From planning to reporting, our dedicated team of client success managers, researchers, and data scientists collaborate closely with institutions to ensure a successful rollout of the training solution.

In addition to a dedicated project team led by a Client Success Manager to guide onboarding and provide unlimited technical support, our services include a tailored facilitator guide, deployment webinar, communication resources, recurring program status updates, completion and CE certificates, on-demand access to an administrator reporting portal, ongoing assessments, and more. This approach significantly reduces the time commitment and resources that a client would usually need to allocate to make these programs successful.

Performance Reporting

Kognito can provide support for evaluative measures required in the grant including number of trainees and number of hours trained. In addition, pre-, post- and 2-month follow-up surveys are integrated in each simulation and the questions included in each survey could be customized to meet the needs of the client evaluation team. The survey infrastructure enables Kognito clients to perform repeated measures design analysis to assess the longitudinal impact of the simulations as well as user attitudes about the simulations.

Writing Kognito into Your Proposal

Let us know how we can help you with your proposal. We are standing by to answer your questions about products, data, and pricing as you work on your proposal. We will also be releasing details on an upcoming webinar with more information. In the meantime, contact us here and don’t miss our HRSA BHWET Grant Applicant Resource Kit with text that you can include directly in your application.

Your Grant Proposal Timeline

The deadline to submit your application on grants.gov is January 21, 2021. If you plan to apply, it is recommended to start the process immediately. According to HRSA, registration in all systems including SAM.gov and Grant.gov can take up to one month to complete. HRSA will not approve deadline extensions for lack of registration. We recommend building in adequate time for internal review.

Best of luck with your proposal, and remember, we’re here to help support your behavioral health workforce training and education.