Towards Personalised Clinical Management of Suicide Risk through Data-Driven Clinical Decision Support using Transnational Electronic Registry Data "PERMANENS"

Two longstanding limitations hamper effective suicide risk management in clinical practice. First, unassisted clinical judgement is not sufficient to accurately assess suicide risk, leading to ineffective clinical decision-making and poor patient experience; and second, the need for adequate mental health treatment is often unmet among patients with suicide risk, and evidence indicates that adverse healthcare trajectories are associated with high morbidity, premature mortality and societal costs related to self-harm.

The PERMANENS project aims to improve suicide prevention by developing a personalised Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS), i.e., a medical software programme that assists in the personalised clinical evaluation and management of suicide risk. The CDSS will innovate current clinical practice by (1) increasing the prediction accuracy of suicide risk assessment; (2) enabling risk assessment for inadequate treatment delivery among patients with suicide risk; (3) enabling fine-grained clinical risk stratification; and (4) enabling the personalised matching of the identified risk profiles with effective treatment in order to improve indicated and tailored treatment trajectories among patients with suicide risk.

Through co-creation and user-oriented qualitative implementation research with patients and clinicians, a user-friendly personalised CDSS prototype will be developed. The CDSS will be provided with a computerised clinical knowledge base on effective suicide prevention interventions and with a transferable personal healthcare record, fully acknowledging patients as end-users of their data.

Award Date

17 October 2022

Award Value

€211,813.00

Principal Investigator

Professor Ella Arensman

Host Institution

University College Cork

Scheme

ERA-NET Cofund for Personalised Medicine