Peers.net

• Student mental health focus: Develop life and character-building skills, Promote Social and School Connectedness, Ensure Student Access to Effective Mental Health Treatment
• Product category: Coaching/mentorship, Self-guided activities, Curriculum/lessons
• Grade levels: 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, 12th grade
• End user(s): Students
• Tiers of intervention: Tier 2, Tier 3
• District experience: <1,000 students
• Free version available?: Free version is available nationwide.
• Detail about availability: Free group sessions are available to students nationwide. Peers.net is also launching a free AI chatbot that will be available to students in all 50 states.  1:1 services free is the individual is covered by one of Peers.net's insurance partners.

• Intended outcomes: Peer support is an evidence-based support intervention that fosters connection and understanding. Peer support can improve symptoms of a wide variety of mental health conditions, help young people live well with mental health distress and illness, and keep people engaged in other levels of mental and physical health care and avoid the need for higher levels of care. In a school setting, peer support increases a sense of belonging and can contribute to attendance and improved academic performance
• Demonstrated outcomes: Peers.net tracks impact and outcomes through independent studies we’re conducting with academic institutions, like Berkeley, and through patient-reported outcomes. They recently wrapped up two studies (awaiting published data) and are preparing to start another one in June 2025. They also track patient reported outcomes after sessions. These patient reported outcomes look at a range of metrics from client satisfaction (95%) to therapeutic alliance (93%).

• Privacy & Security: Peers.net is a HIPAA compliant platform. All protected health information (PHI) is stored within their Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, Apero Health, which is HIPAA compliant, as well as SOC I and SOC II Type 2 certified. Some additional non-health data (PII) is stored within secure, HIPAA compliant Google Cloud servers with encrypted backups.
• Crisis protocols: All peers.net peers are trained in de-escalation to support youth in crisis and they have supervisors (trained in suicide prevention models like ASIST) on call during all shifts. They also partner with Protocal to provide additional crisis back up. The Protocal crisis counselors can dial directly into the session to provide support.

Peers.net provides monthly reporting to partners to show session utilization and de-identified client reported outcome data. They also have custom reporting capabilities and can provide a sample of their standard reporting.

• Web accessibility: Peers.net partnered with accessibility experts at WGU to conduct a comprehensive accessibility review for the platform, based on WCAG 2.0. At this time, they have addressed and resolved all critical accessibility issues, per WCAG standards, and are actively working to address non-critical accessibility issues in ongoing development cycles.
• Language accessibility: Peers.net has several languages available on the platform (Vietnamese, Luganda, Tagalog, and Filipino) and has hired more Spanish speakers for their next cohort.