Inter-Organizational Alignment and Implementation Outcomes in Integrated Mental Healthcare for Children and Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Observational Study.

Background: Integrated care involves care provided by a team of professionals, often in non-traditional settings. A common example worldwide is integrated school-based mental health (SBMH), which involves externally employed clinicians providing care at schools. Integrated mental healthcare can improve the accessibility and efficiency of evidence-based practices (EBPs) for vulnerable populations suffering from fragmented traditional care. However, integration can complicate EBP implementation due to overlapping organizational contexts, diminishing the public health impact. Emerging literature suggests that EBP implementation may benefit from the similarities in the implementation context factors between the different organizations in integrated care, which we termed Methods: SBMH clinicians from community-based organizations (CBOs; Results: The IOA in general context factors exceeded those of implementation context factors. The standalone effects of implementation context factors on most implementation outcomes were larger than those of general context factors. Similarly, implementation context factors between CBOs and schools showed larger 2-way interaction effects on implementation outcomes than general context factors. Conclusions: This study preliminarily supported the importance of IOA in context factors for integrated SBMH. The findings shed light on how IOA in implementation and general context factors may be differentially associated with implementation outcomes across a broad array of integrated mental healthcare settings.