The paper details a working service model based within the King's Maudsley Partnership, sharing how it could be adopted elsewhere to benefit child mental health services.
What is the CAMHS Digital Lab?
Digital innovations and developments in data science could help to make mental health services more efficient and meet growing demand for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). However, there remains a significant gap between these technological advancements and their adoption in clinical practice. To bridge this gap, the CAMHS Digital Lab are pioneering a novel service model for embedding research and innovation into CAMHS. The CAMHS Digital Lab aims to streamline clinical processes, provide population insights, and offer novel ways of understanding young people's needs, therefore enabling CAMHS to be more efficient and effective while reducing costs. The CAMHS Digital Lab is part-funded by the NIHR Maudsley BRC.
We're delighted to have this opportunity to showcase our work in the CAMHS Digital Lab. Clinicians, researchers and informaticians can work together to improve the delivery of child and adolescent mental health services through digital innovation. We hope that sharing our model of working will help others to consider how these practices could be adopted elsewhere.
Dr Alice Wickersham, Research Fellow
What does this new paper share?
This new article in the journal Child Adolescent Mental Health shares in detail the four workstreams within the CAMHS Digital Lab:
- Population and clinical analytics
- Digital therapeutics and assessment
- Data science and discovery
- Education, outreach and training
Each of these workstreams supports delivery of clinical services and allows the team to answer important research questions in child and adolescent mental health. The article also considers how other services across the UK, and even internationally, could adopt or adapt these approaches to meet their local needs.
The CAMHS Digital Lab model we describe in this article represents a lot of hard work from South London's children, young people, teachers, clinicians, informaticians, and researchers. The team is very grateful to them, as well as our very forward-thinking colleagues within the SLaM CAMHS and NIHR Maudsley BRC directorate, whose funding and support has been critical in helping us become embedded into frontline services - pre-empting Lord Darzi's recommendations on shifting the NHS from analogue to digital.
Dr Johnny Downs, Senior Clinical Lecturer
Among other things, the lab uses data collected by South London and Maudsley CAMHS and other public services to understand mental health needs, identify risk factors, highlight inequalities and inform decision making by clinicians and service managers. The lab looks to digital solutions for improving health intelligence, informing service delivery and meeting local needs. The team is multidisciplinary, bringing together expertise from across academic and clinical services.
