Focused mental healthcare for young people delivers big savings to Canadian healthcare
Dave Pearson|August 12, 2026|Health Exec|Economics
A youth mental-health program, national in scale, has been shown to save a country’s public health system $4,000 a year per patient. And while it’s at it, the program helps young people overcome or better manage serious behavioral issues.
The program, Canada’s Access Open Minds national network, has its two-pronged value verified in a study led by investigators at McGill University in Montreal and published in the August edition of The Lancet Psychiatry.
For the research, Jai Shah, MD, and colleagues reviewed records from a single site of care in Edmonton, Alberta.
The team broke the datasets into two cohorts—one drawn from around 1,500 youths diagnosed and treated through a local arm of the Access Open Minds network, the other from 9,000 peers under traditional mental healthcare.
Tracking types of care and associated costs in both cohorts before and after the launch of Access Open Minds, Shah and fellow researchers found the Access group had more intensive service needs throughout the study period, April 2016 through September 2019
The Access youths also had greater and statistically significant reductions in <a href="https://healthylife7.com/hca-workers-at-osceola-hospital-call-for-better-pay-and-benefits/” title=”HCA workers at Osceola hospital call for better pay and benefits”>hospital admissions.
In Canadian dollars, the per-year savings realized were in hospital admissions ($1,961), outpatient visits ($613), specialist care vists ($432) and primary care visits ($47)
In addition, the Access network delivered annual savings in public residential admissions of $1,256 per patient.
There were no significant differences in emergency department visits, the number of prescriptions dispensed, community mental health visits or contracted residential admissions, Shah et al. report.
Mentally healthier youth, fiscally healthier healthcare
The average net cost reduction associated with Access Open Minds was $4,355 per-person per-year.
This figure represented a return on investment of 9.7%, meaning the program saved the public health system $9.70 for every dollar invested
After subtracting implementation costs of $448, the researchers recorded a final net benefit of $3,907 per patient per year.
“Crucially, Access Open Minds Edmonton received individuals who had greater service and reosts), making the observed cost savings possible,” the authors reiterate.
“These findings challenge the notion that enhanced primary youth mental health services can contribute to system efficiency if they serve as an entry point solely for young people with less complex presentations.”
More research needs doing
In their discussion section, Shah and colleagues underscore that, compared with standard community mental health services, Access Open Minds in Edmonton shifted care away from acute, hospital and rey-based settings, representing substantial net cost savings.
They point out that the study is a “promising indication of the effectiveness of early intervention frameworks in youth mental health services.”
However, they emphasize, future economic evaluations of similar initiatives “should integrate data regarding sample complexity and severity into their analyses and a longer time course in following up individuals through systems of care, so as to provide appropriate context on their return on investment and its generalizability to other settings.”
In coverage of the work by McGill’s newsroom, Shah notes that public benefits like those documented in the study “depend on making sure these services remain accessible to young people with the greatest needs.”
“You can only save money,” Shah emphasizes, “if you’re providing care to the people the healthcare system was already spending money on in the first place.”
The study is posted here(behind paywall).
Dave Pearson
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations
