Background: Increased mental health difficulties experienced by young people, and the corresponding rise in the demand for services, has led to a calls across, practise and policy, to innovate in order to address issues of access. The recent adoption of electronic health records offers an unprecedented opportunity to apply machine learning to large mental health datasets to inform service planning, and enable responsive, data-driven, individualised care.
Aims: The current study aims to apply advanced data analytics to youth mental health data to 1) predict the success of treatment based on individual characteristics and 2) use these predictions to propose right first-time treatments 3) explore temporal trends in service usage to inform service development and planning.
Research Question: How accurately can machine learning models predict individual treatment outcomes in young people using baseline clinical and demographic data, and how can these predictions inform service planning and personalised care in a youth mental health service?
Methods: Jigsaw, The National Centre for Youth Mental Health, has been accessed by over 70,000 young people aged 12 to 25 years in Ireland. This electronic health record data forms a national youth mental health dataset which will be used for secondary data analysis. Deliverables (11) will be achieved across 5 work packages: WP1 Dataset Preparation, WP2 Treatment Prediction, WP3 Service User Temporal Trends, WP4 Tool Development and Testing, WP5 Integration and Knowledge Translation. Data analysis will include supervised and unsupervised learning techniques, time-series and longitudinal modelling, utilising calibration plots and SHAP values as appropriate to support interpretability and confidence in model predictions.
Impact: Data insights will be used to anticipate surges in demand and inform service planning. Treatment outcome predictions will inform data-driven, responsive and individualised care. Leveraging digital to improve mental health outcomes is a key requirement Sharing the Vision, Ireland’s National Mental Health Policy.