IMPROVE: Improving Mental Health care using Personalized treatment based on analyses of Routine data for Optimal Value and Effectiveness.

Data warehouse Northern Netherlands to support a new mental health care

Research, innovation and implementation by collaboration between providers, payers, patients, and scientists

Optimizing Mental Health care in Northern Netherlands

Mental health care in the Netherlands is subject to increasing budgetary pressure and this is accompanied by huge challenges to maintain the quality of care while meeting budget ceilings. Simultaneously new and exciting insights concerning development and prognosis of mental disorders seem to open up new opportunities for prevention and treatment and suggest the need of more personalized treatment choices.

The “Rob Giel Research center” consists of six large mental health care organizations covering the provinces Friesland, Groningen, Drenthe, Overijssel and the northern part of North Holland (www.rgoc.nl) in cooperation with the UMCG Psychiatry department. As part of this cooperation, administrative data regarding treatment outcomes and health care use have been systematically gathered and stored in databases. Recently cooperation has been extended with the HTA-unit of the UMCG, Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction (Trimbos-institute), Landelijk platform GGz (LPGGz), an umbrella organization in mental health  and “De Friesland Zorgverzekeraar”, a large regional insurer. The initiative has been taken to use the available data, enrich them with new data sources and analyze the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of mental health care in these regions with the initial focus on the province of Friesland, under the name of IMPROVE.

The IMPROVE-project involves combining data from several sources to support optimal treatment choice. This is implemented by doing research and implementation projects at three levels of aggregation: micro, meso, and macro, in a range of interconnected sub-projects. Data linkage and data handling are performed with utmost care for security and privacy, using TTP and anonymization in an adequate way.

The coming years (until December 2019) the following deliverables are planned:

• An innovative screener to support primary care in triage (diagnosis and referral) regarding mental health
• An ICT tool to support clients and mental care providers in treatment choice
• Health economic decision models for two large mental health conditions geared towards optimization at meso- and macrolevel
• Case studies applying these tools in depression and psychosis care.

Further the project will enhance the existing cooperation at all levels by:

• More intense collaboration between health care users, professionals, care suppliers, payers and scientists
• Enabling teams and organizations to use their own data to develop optimal care

For more information please contact prof. dr. Robert Schoevers or Dr. Talitha Feenstra at the Universitair Centrum Psychiatrie (UCP) at Groningen University Medical Centre (UMCG); r.a.schoevers@umcg.nl, phone: 050- 3612065 or t.l.feenstra@umcg.nl, phone: 050-361 5110.