Abstract

Patient pathways through CAMHS are often highly complex. Electronic health records can be used to conduct research into mental health service access and use. But their utility for tracking details of care pathways can be mixed. We illustrate this in a study of child and adolescent depression pathways through South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. While this study was able to crudely quantify aspects of CAMHS care pathways experienced by these patients, the data was often broad, of uncertain quality, and varied greatly between the two regions. We present efforts we are making to enrich these data in clinical services, for example using scalable approaches including data linkage, novel natural language processing techniques, as well as digital portals for gathering routine outcome measures from patients and caregivers.