Researcher | Research Overview
Dr. Walter's investigations have applied the principles of community-based participatory research to a broad range of multi-year preventive and clinical interventions for youth in elementary, middle, and high schools and in pediatric primary care. These variously-funded (federal [NIH], state, intramural, philanthropic) interventions have been co-developed with the target populations to meet their self-identified needs, and have been conducted in underserved communities in New York City, Chicago, and Boston.
The school-based preventive interventions targeted pediatric risk factors for the future development of cardiovascular disease and cancer; adolescent risk factors for the contemporaneous development of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS; and youth risk factors for the development of child and adolescent psychiatric disorders. The school-based clinical interventions focused on incorporating behavioral health services into school-based health centers to provide greater access to care in underserved communities. The findings from these innovative approaches to health care service delivery in non-traditional settings have been published in high impact medical journals; the programs have also garnered multiple national awards for exemplary innovation and have been widely disseminated.
Dr. Walter’s most recent research has focused on the development of a collaborative care intervention bringing behavioral health services to a statewide, community-based pediatric primary care network affiliated with Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). This multi-component intervention comprises behavioral health education and psychiatric consultation for pediatric primary care practitioners, integration of behavioral health clinicians into pediatric practices, and behavioral health care coordination. The goal of this ongoing intervention is to enable the management of mild to moderate presentations of common psychiatric disorders in the primary care setting, thereby conserving the specialty behavioral health workforce for severe, complex, and treatment-refractory presentations. The outcomes of this intervention have been widely published, and locally-modified versions of the intervention have been implemented in multiple pediatric primary care networks nationwide.
Dr. Walter’s current focus is the development, dissemination, and evaluation of a new BCH website – Building Bridges of Understanding – that provides nationally accessible evidence-based behavioral health education to pediatric primary care practitioners, behavioral health clinicians working in pediatric settings, and pediatric patients and their families. This initiative is designed to create collaborative professional and lay partnerships that can help narrow the gap between youth in need of behavioral health services, and those who receive them.
Researcher | Research Background
Dr. Walter was trained in preventive medicine and public health (epidemiology) at the University of California at Los Angeles schools of medicine and public health, general psychiatry at New York University Medical Center/Bellevue Hospital, and child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center/New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Walter has more than 170 print and media publications pertaining to community-based participatory research and clinical education. Her work has been recognized with the Simon Wile Leadership in Consultation and Catchers in the Rye awards from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, where she has been designated a Distinguished Life Fellow.
Dr. Walter attained the rank of Professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern Feinberg and Boston University medical schools, and currently is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Senior Attending Psychiatrist at Boston Children’s Hospital.