Mental Health Research Network III

Summary:The Mental Health Research Network conducts practice-based mental health research in large healthcaresystems serving over 25 million patients in 16 states. The network has the potential to dramatically improve thespeed, efficiency, relevance and impact of mental health clinical and services research. A primary aim of thisnetwork is to have large-scale data infrastructure available for rapid analysis.With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare systems quickly changed from using mostly in-personclinic visits to telehealth visits that use phone or video to care for patients. However, we do not know how thechange to telehealth affects people with mental health conditions. This supplemental application uses theinfrastructure of the Mental Health Research Network to examine how changing from office visits to telehealthvisits disrupts care of people with mental health conditions in three healthcare systems. We want tounderstand how this change to telehealth may affect people differently, including people of racial or ethnicminority groups, patients who speak a language other than English at home, children or teenagers, olderadults, people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, people living in rural areas, or people living in areas withlow income or education. We also want to understand how these changes affect the severity of someone'sanxiety or depression, whether they keep taking their mental health medications or continue going to therapy,whether they visit the emergency department or need to be hospitalized in the mental health unit, or whetherthey have increased risk to attempt suicide.Understanding the effects of transitioning to telehealth visits will help us understand who is, and is not, as ableto access and engage in healthcare in future times of crisis - when going to the doctor's office in person maynot be safe - so that we can offer those patients more help and support. In addition, this research has broaderimplications regarding who benefits and who needs more support as the field of behavioral health carecontinues to rapidly transition to more regular use of telehealth services moving forward.