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Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago
Dr. Jessica Schleider is a Professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, where her research focuses on developing and testing scalable, brief interventions for youth mental health. She is the co-founder of Navi, a digital platform designed to deliver single-session mental wellness support to young people.
Dr. Jennifer Hoffmann is a pediatric emergency medicine physician and researcher at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Her work focuses on improving mental health care for youth in emergency settings, including suicide risk screening and intervention.
Dr. Juan Pablo Zapata is a researcher at Northwestern University whose work centers on implementation science and equity in youth mental health care.
Suicide is a leading cause of death among young people in the United States. Universal suicide risk screening in emergency departments (EDs) has significantly increased identification of at-risk youth in recent years — ED visits involving diagnoses of suicidal thoughts and behaviors have risen from 0.9% to 4.2%, now accounting for approximately 1.2 million visits annually. Despite this, many youth are discharged from the ED without psychiatric consultation or evidence-based intervention, leaving a critical gap during one of the highest-risk periods following a crisis.
Single-session interventions (SSIs) offer a promising, scalable approach to address this gap. SSIs are short, structured programs designed to provide meaningful mental health support in a single encounter. Research — including a meta-analysis of 50 randomized trials — has demonstrated that SSIs can produce sustained reductions in depression and anxiety symptoms in youth, and can be delivered effectively in digital, self-guided formats.
This project will test the Navi platform, a self-guided digital tool that delivers SSIs — including a safety planning module — to youth who screen positive for suicide risk during an ED visit. The study has three aims: (1) adapt and refine the Navi platform for the fast-paced ED environment through collaboration with Community Advisory Boards made up of youth, caregivers, and ED staff; (2) conduct an open pilot trial with 10–12 youth ages 10–17 to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and early clinical signals of the intervention; and (3) use qualitative interviews to further refine the platform and identify barriers and facilitators to real-world implementation.
The study will take place at Lurie Children’s Hospital, which serves more than 58,000 ED visits annually and screens all patients age 10 and older for suicide risk.
If successfully integrated into ED workflows, a scalable, self-guided digital intervention could dramatically expand access to evidence-based support for youth in crisis — reaching young people at the exact moment they need it, without requiring additional clinical staff. This project will generate critical feasibility and acceptability data to inform a larger trial, and could ultimately serve as a model for suicide prevention in emergency departments nationwide.
