Over 2.5 million US adolescents struggle with mental health
challenges, and multiracial adolescents are at greatest risk due to limited
access to mental health programs. As roughly half of lifetime mental disorders
have their first onset by mid-adolescence, it is vital to promote help-seeking
for prevention and early intervention during this important developmental
stage.
This project will test the implementation of an evidence-based mental illness prevention program — teen Mental Health First Aid (tMHFA) — in a diverse and underserved school district to facilitate help seeking among teens aged 16-18. While tMHFA has a proven track record of effectively enhancing knowledge of mental health problems, reducing stigma and promoting help-seeking behaviors, its efficacy across dimensions of race and ethnicity is underexamined in the US.
Academic (UW & SMART Center), education (Tacoma Public Schools) and behavioral health organization (MultiCare) stakeholders will address this gap by conducting a mixed-methods study with 1) focus groups to obtain diverse teens aged 15-18 opinions about facilitators and barriers in help-seeking; and 2) longitudinal data collection to examine the impact of the innovative tMHFA’s potential to address help-seeking barriers across dimensions of race and ethnicity. The findings of this project will guide both the revisions to the program to improve its efficacy and the scaling of this program to support government legislation to expand service delivery to other schools and to rural areas across the state.
Most young adults with mental health (e.g., depression, anxiety) or substance use disorders do not receive treatment. Untreated mental health and substance use can be associated with impairments in social relationships, overall functioning and suicide. National data indicate that almost half of young adults with symptoms of a mental health disorder reported they needed mental health care in the past year but did not access those services. Barriers to accessing mental health care include stigma, not knowing where to go, lack of transportation and cost.
This project aims to develop a personalized web-based program for young adults to reduce self-reported barriers and increase motivation to access mental health and substance use services. Investigators will work with clinicians and young adults to develop strategies and solutions to address the identified barriers. The team will work with a community advisory board to develop program content that will be further refined through focus groups and individual interviews with young adults and clinicians. From this, the team will develop the web-based program which will serve as the first step needed to establish a larger program of research focused on reducing barriers and increasing access to mental health care to improve young adult well-being.
The most salient and debilitating aspect of dementia is memory loss. Unfortunately, memory loss is also the most difficult to quantify because it relies on doctor-administered tests that cannot be repeated very often. Without frequent and accurate measurements, it is difficult for clinicians to make reliable diagnoses, for patients and their caretakers to prepare in advance and for researchers to better understand the relationship between brain changes and cognitive decline.
This project will recruit 100 patients who are just beginning to experience memory loss as well as 100 healthy controls. Their memory function will be measured weekly through a brief, online test that can be accessed through any device and performed in less than 10 minutes. Data from the test will be fed to a computer model that simulates how fast memories fade in each patient’s brain, and the parameter that represents each patient’s speed of forgetting will be tracked over time. While the model simulates the patient, it also adapts the difficulty of the weekly task, ensuring it remains engaging but doable as memory declines.
The weekly estimates will provide the first, detailed trajectories of how fast memory declines over time in healthy aging and in different forms of dementia. The trajectory of the rate of forgetting will be used to analyze MRI data, producing precise associations between different types of memory loss and different types of brain damage.
UW Medicine has amassed detailed patient treatment and business data in its electronic medical record (EMR). This information is a treasure trove that is not used to its full potential for two reasons: 1) For each clinical encounter, only a fraction of the information in the EMR is relevant, and virtually all of the information a clinician engages remains in a format that obscures patterns and trends; and 2) In groups of patients with the same illness, data from the EMR could be used to discern larger trends in the course of the disease or evaluate the effect of practice patterns on patient outcomes. The EMR currently does not provide a way to access this information in an agile way.
We have developed innovative software, “Leaf,” that allows medical providers to access population-based EMR data in real time. Leaf is now used at several academic medical centers nationally. In this project, we will collaborate with the UW Memory and Brain Wellness Center to design and evaluate “dashboards” that visualize how a patient’s history and trajectory compare to other, similar patients. For instance, daily function and cognitive testing data for a person with Alzheimer’s disease, already gathered over the course of several years, could be graphed and compared to the same information from all UW patients with Alzheimer’s disease. We will pilot these dashboards in Leaf and collect patient and provider feedback. We intend to publish our results and make code available as part of the open Leaf platform for rapid dissemination.
Positron emission tomography (PET) is an imaging technique that uses radioactive substances to visualize and assess the brain function. Apart from its heavy use in clinical oncology, PET is widely used in a variety of other conditions such as various neurological, psychiatric, neuropsychological, and cognitive disorders and is the gold standard for assessing neurodegeneration. In particular, PET is clinically used to distinguish Alzheimer’s disease from other dementias and assess the disease progression. Despite its clinical importance, PET imaging encounters barriers because of limited availability, expense and radiation exposure.
This project seeks to address this barrier to brain health using artificial intelligence to predict PET brain images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Such a method would be extremely beneficial in clinical settings because unlike PET, MRI is widely available, non-invasive and relatively inexpensive. The approach essentially turns an MRI scanner into a PET scanner, opening up this technology to sites and applications in which PET is either unavailable or infeasible. Doing so would give millions of people access to initial screens for Alzheimer’s disease, assessment of disease progression and an easy way to monitor treatment.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is common in the United States with 2.87 million emergency department visits related to TBI per year. Chronic pain is a frequent complaint following TBI, with more than half of patients reporting pain. Individuals with TBI are often prescribed opioids for pain following their injury, but unfortunately may be especially vulnerable to post-injury alcohol and drug use problems.
Despite increased opioid prescriptions and risk factors for this population, there are no clinical practice guidelines for opioid prescription following TBI and limited published research. The project seeks to address this knowledge gap by using routinely collected clinical data from several different data sources to examine when and how opioids are prescribed following TBI in a community-based population.
This complete picture of opioid prescription following TBI may reveal trends of higher opioid prescription for specific subpopulations or areas of healthcare. Through understanding the trajectory of opioid prescription following TBI, we will be able to identify the scope of the problem and the most appropriate time points for intervention. Ultimately this project will provide the foundation for new approaches to reduce opioid prescription in the clinical management of TBI.
Curriculum codesign is a capacity building initiative to cocreate therapeutic interventions alongside community partners using research translation and design-oriented activities.
Using a scoping review approach, CoLab is systematically looking for reviews and authoritative sources to guide a model for value-based care for pediatric behavioral health. Our review approach was informed by guidelines for scoping reviews and rapid evidence reviews. The initial goal of this project was systematically looking for reviews and authoritative sources to guide a model for value-based care for pediatrics and mental health. Then, we would compile and synthesize the literature to see if there are any value-based models that would appear to be most effective for pediatric behavioral health care.
CoLab partnered with the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department to develop a health equity policy recommendation using a codesign process that combines research evidence and community and stakeholder voice. The first phase consists of an overarching review to identify existing public health policies that have a strong positive impact on health equity while also synthesizing community-identified priorities to identify 10 pro-equity policy areas to provide direction for addressing COVID-19 recovery efforts in Pierce County. The second phase includes gathering a core design team of policymakers, key stakeholders, and community leaders to come together and design a policy recommendation that is feasible, sustainable, and fits the unique needs of the Pierce County community. There are two goals of this project: 1) piloting a participatory policymaking codesign process that centers community voice and 2) co-create a policy recommendation with key stakeholders, community leaders, and policymakers that supports health and equity in Pierce County. The codesign team is currently in the implementation phase of codesign: proposing and refining a policy on the scale up of community land trusts across the county to ultimately improve economic equity, housing affordability, and physical and behavioral healthcare access.
