I’m passionate about Routine Outcome Monitoring, and am the co-founder and Director of NovoPsych, a company that creates software for mental health clinicians.
I run workshops for clinicians on outcome monitoring and consult with organisations wishing to implement outcome measurement practices.
Routine outcome monitoring is the regular evaluation of a patient’s treatment response during the course of treatment and provides health care professionals with information relevant to a patient’s progress. This monitoring can improve patient outcomes by enabling clinicians to detect and treat functional and psychological problems that previously may have been missed.
Who Benefits from Outcome Monitoring?
The monitoring is not only useful for clinician and patients themselves, but also provides an opportunity for treatment effectiveness to be evaluated at a systemic level.
Using Data Analytics to Improve Care
Advances in data analytics and computing power mean that large datasets are an important resource in the decision making process. The best datasets are generally those that are routinely collected by clinicians as a core part of practice– but contain enough detail for researchers and funders to use for valuable secondary analysis.
It is possible to use these datasets to understand trends, patterns and correlations at a large scale and investigate a range of questions much more rapidly and cost-effectively than using methods such as surveys and clinical trials alone. Not only this, datasets can be used to predict with a high degree of accuracy the progression of illness, and therefore what interventions/funding would be optimal.
The wealth of high quality longitudinal data collected by NovoPsych provides an opportunity to undertake an evaluation of programs and design systems to provide people the best care in a real-time, evidence-based way.
Reducing the strain on Australia’s mental healthcare system requires finding novel approaches to sustainable healthcare delivery. Key to this is investing in a mental healthcare environment that predicts, prevents and delays the onset of chronic and long-term dysfunction, eliminates low-value care and has the capacity to scrutinize and adjust funding in a timely way.
To this end, I’m devoted to using science to improve outcome monitoring practices and developing NovoPsych into Australia’s best outcome monitoring software.