With a new 5-year $10 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Mental Health Research Network (MHRN) will add new partners, increasing the diversity and size of the populations it studies.
Launched in 2010 under the direction of Greg Simon, M.D., M.P.H., Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute senior investigator and a KP psychiatrist, the MHRN has developed new ways to use electronic health records to improve how providers identify patients with mental health disorders and promptly deliver the most appropriate treatments.
It has grown to a consortium of 14 research centers affiliated with the nation’s largest integrated health systems:
• Seven Kaiser Permanente regions
• Baylor Scott & White, Texas
• Essentia Health, Duluth MN
• Harvard Pilgrim, Boston
• HealthPartners, Bloomington MN
• Henry Ford Health, Detroit
• Insight Network, NY
• Sutter Health, Sacramento
In a Q&A published on the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute website, Simon explained the impact of the new grant.
“The Insight network, led by Dr. Jyotishman Pathak of Weill Cornell Medicine, is joining MHRN. Insight includes several large health systems serving over 10 million patients in the New York City area,” he said. “This addition will nearly double the size and increase the diversity of the MHRN member/patient population. The Insight network includes a diverse range of health systems, including safety-net providers serving large numbers of uninsured people. That fills in an important gap in our network.”
Simon added that MHRN’s work to identify and address risk of suicide or self-harm has transformed research and healthcare delivery. “I can honestly say we have moved the boundary of what seems possible in terms of identifying people at high risk for suicidal behavior and implementing effective suicide prevention strategies across large health systems.”
MHRN includes over 20 active research projects, and several include collaborations with health systems outside the network. This new funding will support four specific projects: a large pragmatic trial of mindfulness-based therapy for depression in pregnancy, an evaluation of patient and clinician views about use of algorithms or prediction models in suicide prevention, an evaluation of how new medications for depression affect risk of suicide attempt, and testing of an outreach program to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in starting treatment for depression.
Simon noted that work on machine learning or artificial intelligence is too often focused on the newest tools rather than the practical jobs that need to be done. “We aim to apply the most advanced analytic methods, such as machine learning, to questions that actually matter in clinical care. We aim to match the most effective tools with the most important jobs. We are not committed to any specific tools. Instead we focus on what patients, clinicians, and health systems need.”
