Abstract
Over the past twodecades, healthcare providers across the world have adopted digital methods for capturing clinical and administrative information. Clinicians take contemporaneous records of their interactions with patients, so many health service providers have accrued vast repositories of longitudinally collected data. These data, coupled with advances in data extraction methods, computer processing power, and linkage to nonhealth public services data, now provide child and adolescent mental health researchers unique opportunities for tackling a broad range of clinical questions; especially those where the considerations of scale and generalizability make individually funded studies unaffordable. However, these “big” data have their limitations. Best practice requires clinicians, informaticians, and data scientists to work together, so assumptions over data quality or validity are not misplaced. This chapter explains why the evidence base for child and adolescent mental healthcare needs big data applications as well as conventional research, to move the field forward. This chapter provides illustrations of big data applications to child and adolescent mental healthcare, primarily from England and the United Kingdom, but also offers a section on the global perspective. This chapter also reviews the methodological strengths and weaknesses of big data and describes the ethical and governance implications for their use.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Shaping the Future of Child and Adolescent Mental Health |
| Subtitle of host publication | Towards Technological Advances and Service Innovations |
| Place of Publication | London |
| Publisher | Elsevier Science Ltd |
| Chapter | 3 |
| Pages | 59-79 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Edition | 1 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780323917094 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780323917100 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 26 Sept 2022 |