Today's post comes from Commander Brenda Gearhart, Chief, Clinical Practice Resource Support, PH Clinical Standards of Care Directorate. This post is republished from the DCOE blog.

A big focus of the Psychological Health Clinical Standards of Care Directorate and Strategies, Plans, and Programs Directorate, has been developing a process for agencies, organizations and individuals outside of DCoE to be able to share a concept or idea related to psychological health or traumatic brain injury with DCoE. As it stood during DCoE’s first year, there was no standardized process for how people let us know about ideas.
 
Both directorates are therefore very pleased about the “Idea/Concept Submission” form link on DCoE’s Web site home page, which went up recently. Now, we have a submission form process on our Web site specifically for the purpose of enabling people to share their ideas regarding the treatment of psychological health issues and traumatic brain injury with us.
 
Submitters are asked to include evidence for their submissions, as we are looking for evidence based tools. Two subject matter experts review all submissions and determine their relevance to DCoE’s mission and the level of evidence to support it. If the concept is relevant and has sufficient evidence, the reviewers determine what audience is appropriate for the submitter, and they are invited to share their ideas either in person or through teleconference/VTC.. 
 
Creation of the submission form process has been a tremendous task, and it will be a great tool for sharing ideas and creating dialogue. As one of our priorities is building a support network for our service members and their families, a lot of our work is collaborating with other organizations and agencies to identify the best resources and practices available to support them.