Using e-Science to

Facilitate Mental Health Research

Clinical

The clinical data for this information system will be collected by project specific PsyGrid Clinical Research Officers. Patients will be identified in EI teams, CMHT, AO teams, CAHMS teams and inpatient/outpatient departments throughout the trusts. The 'clients' will be interviewed using FEP assessment scales and the data will then be uploaded onto PsyGrid web portal. We envisage the PsyGrid CRO's to establish working referral relationships with the clinical teams within the trusts to fulfil our recruitment targets.

If you would like more information regarding PsyGrid, please visit the website at: www.psygrid.org.

Motivation and Vision

PsyGrid is an e-Science project funded by the MRC within two primary aims. The first is to establish a virtual research community that links academic and NHS partners to enhance research and development capability.

The second is to harness e-Science middleware technologies to facilitate clinical trials and longitudinal studies in first episode psychosis.

The PsyGrid Information system will support:

The collection of baseline and follow-up data over 3 years on consecutive first episode psychosis (FEP) cases from geographical dispersed centres.

Cross-linkage of the FEP data set with existing NHS data sets and data from external sources such as the Office of National Statistics.

User friendly statistical analysis tools to support hypothesis driven epidemiological research.

Integration with brain imaging data and in the future genetic data.
 
A clinical trial designer that provides easy to use tools for creating new clinical trials and a clinical trial manager to identify eligible cases and manage randomisation and protocol tracking.

A virtual research environment which provides for collaboration and information sharing among mental health professionals.

Technology

PsyGrid will be delivered to the end user as a personalised workbench accessible through any web browser. The PsyGrid portal will provide the user with single sign-on access to all the resources available in PsyGrid, and each resource will be protected role based access control. Our approach to developing PsyGrid system will be to build a generic set of components that are applicable across the whole of epidemiology. We will supplement this core with a set of domain specific components for first episode psychosis and early intervention.

Finally, we will provide tools to aid the adaptation, deployment and configuration of the system to a new domain of application. The PsyGrid development team will follow software engineering best practice to ensure that the system developed is usable, secure, scalable and reliable.