Health Ecosystems Research and Decision Analytics in Mental Healthcare

Health Ecosystems Research (HER) is a new discipline in implementation sciences that incorporates systems dynamics, context analysis, health economics and knowledge discovery from data. HER is relevant for improving knowledge translation to policy and to guide decision making in complex questions in health care. Components of healthcare ecosystem include the drivers and models of a system, its boundaries, the social and demographic factors, the lifestyles, the agents (users, carers, professionals, teams and organisations), and their connections (resource use, outcomes, needs, and values). Obstacles to the availability of comparable information on the service delivery system across local areas, regions and countries include the absence of a common terminology or a standard unit of analysis of care teams and services.

Starting in 1994, the EPCAT group developed a battery of seminal instruments for the assessment of local care for adults experiencing mental illness in Europe. One of these instruments, the European Service Mapping Schedule (ESMS), was later adapted for mapping services in other sectors and population groups including chronic care and disabilities (DESDE-LTC). The ESMS/DESDE system has been used for mapping local services and for producing atlases of MH care in over 30 countries in Europe, Australia and America. It has also been used for mapping care for other entities and sectors such as drug and alcohol, social services, disabilities and chronic care provision at local, regional and national level.

Distinctive patterns of mental health care have emerged showing similarities and differences across countries, between urban and rural care, and in different sectors. This local context information is critical to produce real world decision support systems. Combined with visual tools, the atlases improve prior expert knowledge and reduce uncertainty in policy planning. Additionally the production of comparable atlases of mental health care plays a key role in the international strategies such as global urban mental health planning.

This event is an Institute of Mental Health Seminar as part of Division of Psychiatry lecture series at University College London.