From NRI's State Mental Health Agency Services Research, Program Evaluation and Policy conference, Collaborative Research Opportunities for Addressing Mental Health Policy Issues: Building partnerships between state mental health authorities, NIMH, and SAMHSA, Renata Henry, Michael Schoenbaum, Jeanne Rivard, David Chambers, and Jeffrey Buck
R. Henry (State perspective) - States have to make decisions but there are gaps between research, policy, and practice so that decisions are made without adequate information. The collaboration helps to identify key questions, disseminate relevant research, and interpret and use data to inform decisions. This important because information is shared across states providing for faster uptake and improved management of information.
D. Chambers (NIMH) - While there has been an increase in research on EBP policy in the states there was a lack of coordination of information to decide what impact these changes have made. Want to explore using existing state and national data to understand the impact of policy. Transformation grants are trying to push integration of the various data streams to create added value. Want to fund collaborative grants with 2 PIs State and Researcher). Want to understand the total impact of policy changes across a variety of different agencies within the state (e.g., MH, corrections, SSI)
J. Rivard (NRI) - State Mental Health Policy Laboratory. This is really a data set that can be queried to look at different policy changes across states. The goal is to gather data that is specific to policy not to look for policies within data. Potentially support:
- Multi-state interest groups based on current efforts and policy
- States with data warehouses can help move this forward with cross agency data
- Identify states with specific initiatives and look for common data elements for cross state analyses.
- Identify common data elements across all states in national data sets for policy analysis.
There is currently a limit in that we collect data from the mental health system but NOT from all of the mental health treatment that occurs in other agencies and sectors. Nor is there very good sharing of data and research between any of the stakeholders.
J. Buck (SAMHSA) - Sees collaboration and a broader collection and sharing of data is something that is going to be very important. In the next couple of months will be releasing their data strategy (be more systematic about data collection and analysis, need to look at issues across various agencies). Want to increase data interoperability in administrative data sets being able to join data at the level of the consumer and provider.