Grant: Health System Impact Fellowships - PostDoc Western Canada 2 year

The program of work proposes to improve current surveillance system for mental health and sub-stance use (MHSU) conditions by looking deeper into how patients use service system. Currently, basic administrative data are used to count prevalences for a handful of MHSU conditions: select-ed mental illnesses and mood and anxiety disorders. However, many other conditions are hard to diagnose and to track. In coordination with the Provincial Working Group (with membership in-cluding Ministry of Health, Centre for Disease Control, and provincial health authorities) we pro-pose focusing on the following disorder groupings: a) schizophrenia, b) major depression, c) anxie-ty, d) alcohol-related e) opioid-related, and f) cannabis-related disorders. We will 1) extract trans-action data of using secondary and tertiary services from electronic health records (EHR) of local health authorities, 2) determine what patterns of service utilization can be used to describe chron-ic MHSU conditions, and then 3) organize results into a system of regular reports that could be used by patients, doctors, researchers, and surveillance agencies. This research address the prob-lem of incomplete and inaccurate case definitions and mixed case groupings for meatal health and substance use disorders. Our practical goal is to improve the integrity and validity of case def-initions for MHSU conditions and to build a robust system for surveillance and reporting on these chronic conditions. Our ultimate goal is to impact the policy and practice of addressing MHSU problems.