The health system’s new Behavioral Health & Wellness Center puts access, integration, and early intervention at the center of pediatric mental healthcare.
At Children’s Nebraska, solving for the future of pediatric mental healthcare begins with rebuilding how children and families access care in the first place.
That philosophy is embedded in the newly opened Behavioral Health & Wellness Center on Children’s Omaha campus, a $114 million facility designed to offer a full continuum of pediatric mental health services under one roof, including 24/7 walk-in crisis assessment, 40 beds for inpatient hospitalization, two partial hospitalization programs, outpatient services, and on-site primary care.
But Children’s leaders say the center’s true significance lies less in its size or scope than in the system-level shift it represents. Pediatric behavioral health is now at the forefront of Children’s mission, which wasn’t the case when president and CEO Chanda Chacón initially arrived in 2020.
“Any other condition that impacted one in five or one in four children, we would have tackled more aggressively than we were tackling mental health and behavioral health,” Chacón said. “We had an obligation to the communities that we serve to do better than what we were doing.”
At the heart of the new model is a crisis assessment center built around a “no wrong door” policy, allowing families to walk in without referrals regardless of acuity. Rather than defaulting to inpatient admission or turning families away, clinicians assess needs and guide patients to the appropriate next step in care.
Renee Rafferty, senior vice president of behavioral health and wellness at Children’s Nebraska, said the existing system too often left families without help at their most vulnerable moments.
“Families often were met with being told, ‘You either meet criteria or not,’ and you go home without any resources or services,” she said. “We’re changing that.”
Rafferty emphasized that the crisis assessment is meant to be a stabilizing entry point, not a gateway to unnecessary hospitalization. “That reduces the stress families feel that they’re not coming in always to be admitted,” she said.
Children’s has already seen heavy utilization in the first weeks of operation, reinforcing leadership’s view that unmet demand has long outpaced existing access.
Pictured: Chanda Chacón, president and CEO, Children’s Nebraska.
Integration over isolation
Unlike standalone psychiatric facilities, the Behavioral Health & Wellness Center is physically and clinically integrated into Children’s main campus, including a co-located pediatric primary care clinic. Leaders say that decision was intentional.
“We really want to define this as whole child care, that mental health and physical health go hand in hand,” Chacón said. “For so long, healthcare was defined only around physical health and that separation created stigma.”
By embedding behavioral health within a pediatric hospital setting, Children’s aims to normalize mental healthcare and ensure smoother transitions across levels of care.
“Behavioral health is health,” Rafferty said. “That full continuum of care is available within the Behavioral Health & Wellness Center because that’s the way we approach care.”
The center was funded through a mix of philanthropy, state support, and hospital investment, including $16 million in federal ARPA funding from the State of Nebraska, $15 million from Children’s Nebraska, and significant donor contributions through partnerships such as the Mental Health Innovation Foundation.
Chacón stated that the funding structure allowed the hospital to move faster than it could have alone and sent a powerful message beyond the balance sheet.
“It wasn’t a Children’s Nebraska solve or a legislative solve,” she said. “We as a state had to say this was important, and we were all going to go in to make this the very best facility and the best level of care that we can provide.”
Rafferty added that community investment helped reframe behavioral health as a shared responsibility rather than a niche service.
“That investment from the community really signaled a new way of approaching behavioral health,” she said. “It was just so clear that Nebraskans deeply care about changing the trajectory of stigma that sometimes goes along with severe behavioral health crises.”
Pictured: Renee Rafferty, senior vice president of behavioral health and wellness, Children’s Nebraska.
Sustainability without chasing volume
Despite the scale of the project, leaders emphasized that success will not be measured by expanding inpatient capacity over time.
“We’re not planning on building more behavioral health acute beds,” Rafferty said. “We hope that we can advocate to get upstream and to really support that the system needs to be built out from both the acute side as well as the community services.”
Financial sustainability, she noted, depends on right-sizing services, advocating for better behavioral health reimbursement, and reducing costly downstream utilization elsewhere in the healthcare system.
“When you invest in behavioral health and when you make sure that the system is affordable, is something that people can access, you prevent spend in other parts of the system that are actually poor outcomes and much more expensive,” Rafferty said.
Staffing behavioral health services remains a national challenge, but Children’s leaders said recruitment for the new center benefited from the organization’s cultural strategy, as well as from the “beautiful building” constructed to care for kids.
“When the community sees that kind of investment, they’re more willing to come in and share their gifts and talents,” Rafferty said.
That approach includes scholarships and a deliberate emphasis on clinician well-being.
On the education side, Children’s equips clinicians across the state through its Children’s Outreach and Provider Education (COPE) program. The initiative helps bridge gaps in access by connecting community providers with behavioral health expertise, allowing the workforce to intervene earlier and prevent escalation of symptoms.
“Our investment in their education and their overall mental health and well-being and putting that people-first culture is really what is helping us to succeed and to be able to open on time and to provide this amazing care,” Rafferty said.
For both Chacón and Rafferty, the center’s impact will hinge on whether families seek care earlier and crises become less severe over time.
“When they are accessing us at lower acuity going forward,” Chacón said, “that will be what we determine as success, when we start talking about whole child health.”