Center for Mental Health Services Research Dissemination Activities

Introduction The University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) Center for Mental Health Services Research (CMHSR) conducts research to enhance services, improve the quality of life, and promote recovery for people with behavioral health conditions. The Center was founded in 1993 as a Massachusetts Department of Mental Health Research Center of Excellence. Center faculty receive funding from a variety of federal, state and foundation sources. The Center’s focus on community-based research and engagement with providers, consumers and families also carries the message of hope for the many adults, children, adolescents and families living with mental illness. The Mental Health Agency Research Network (MHARN) expands on the dissemination and research functions of CMHSR to reach providers serving DMH clients across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The goals of the MHARN include Dissemination, Engagement and Collaboration as a way to facilitate the translation of research findings into practice and bring together providers with researchers to engage in new research on services provided in the community. Four Research Subject Areas: Child, Youth & Family Mental Health Law, Ethics & Mental Health Multicultural Research Rehabilitation, Recovery & Wellness The Dissemination Series Products for a diverse audience including clinicians/providers, mental health service users and their families, and researchers. Psychiatry Issue Briefs Issue briefs focus on translating research findings into concise, user-friendly information that is accessible to all Research You Can Use A one-page summary of research findings and recommendations specifically developed for busy providers Research in the Works Summarizes current and ongoing research project

The Mental Health Agency Research Network (MHARN): Developing a statewide network for knowledge sharing, technical assistance & collaborative research

The Mental Health Agency Research Network (MHARN) is a developing network for sharing knowledge and research collaboration between the UMMS Dept. of Psychiatry and other academics, DMH personnel, community providers, consumers and family members. Its mission is to close the gap between science and service in mental health services in Massachusetts by improving implementation of evidence based practices to benefit consumers. The MHARN provides a structure and mechanism for the Center for Mental Health Services Research (CMHSR) to better engage with DMH staff and community agencies around the state. As experience and research on science-to-service has demonstrated that dissemination of information about research findings is not sufficient to bring about changes in practice and benefits to consumers, the MHARN will incorporate principles and practices of the emerging science of implementation research

DataSHIELD: taking the analysis to the data, not the data to the analysis

Research in modern biomedicine and social science requires sample sizes so large that they can often only be achieved through a pooled co-analysis of data from several studies. But the pooling of information from individuals in a central database that may be queried by researchers raises important ethico-legal questions and can be controversial. In the UK this has been highlighted by recent debate and controversy relating to the UK's proposed 'care.data' initiative, and these issues reflect important societal and professional concerns about privacy, confidentiality and intellectual property. DataSHIELD provides a novel technological solution that can circumvent some of the most basic challenges in facilitating the access of researchers and other healthcare professionals to individual-level data. Commands are sent from a central analysis computer (AC) to several data computers (DCs) storing the data to be co-analysed. The data sets are analysed simultaneously but in parallel. The separate parallelized analyses are linked by non-disclosive summary statistics and commands transmitted back and forth between the DCs and the AC. This paper describes the technical implementation of DataSHIELD using a modified R statistical environment linked to an Opal database deployed behind the computer firewall of each DC. Analysis is controlled through a standard R environment at the AC. Based on this Opal/R implementation, DataSHIELD is currently used by the Healthy Obese Project and the Environmental Core Project (BioSHaRE-EU) for the federated analysis of 10 data sets across eight European countries, and this illustrates the opportunities and challenges presented by the DataSHIELD approach. DataSHIELD facilitates important research in settings where: (i) a co-analysis of individual-level data from several studies is scientifically necessary but governance restrictions prohibit the release or sharing of some of the required data, and/or render data access unacceptably slow; (ii) a research group (e.g. in a developing nation) is particularly vulnerable to loss of intellectual property-the researchers want to fully share the information held in their data with national and international collaborators, but do not wish to hand over the physical data themselves; and (iii) a data set is to be included in an individual-level co-analysis but the physical size of the data precludes direct transfer to a new site for analysis