JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mental illness among emerging adults is often difficult to ameliorate due to fluctuating symptoms and heterogeneity. Recently, innovative approaches have been develop to improve mental health care for emerging adults including: 1) Implementing Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) to assess illness severity and inform stratified care to assign emerging adults to a treatment modality commensurate with their level of impairment, 2) Implementation of a rapid learning health system in which data are continuously collected and analyzed to generate new insights which are then translated to clinical practice, including collaboration between clients, healthcare providers and researchers to co-design and co-evaluate assessment and treatment strategies.

Objective:

To determine the feasibility and acceptability of implementing a rapid learning health system to enable a measurement-based, stratified care treatment strategy for emerging adults.

Methods:

This study takes place at a specialty clinic serving emerging adults (age 16-24) in Calgary, Canada and involves extensive collaboration between researchers, providers and youth. Qualitative and quantitative feedback will be collected from healthcare providers and youth throughout the implementation process. These data will be analyzed at regular intervals and used to modify the way future services are delivered.

Results:

Presently, we have developed a system of PROMs and organized clinical services into strata of care. We will soon begin using PROMs to assign clients to a stratum of care and using feedback from youth and clinicians to understand how to improve experiences and outcomes.

Conclusions:

This study has key implications for researchers and clinicians looking to understand how to customize emerging adult mental health services to improve quality of care and satisfaction with care.