Center for Education and Research on Mental Health Ther*

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DESCRIPTION (Provided by the Applicant): The Mental Health CERTs will build on strong existing collaborations to create a coherent, multidisciplinary program targeting improvement of outcomes of psychotropic medication use. It brings strong capacity, distinguished investigators, and substantial data and methodological resources to the CERTs network. It combines a clear, long-term strategic vision with achievable short-term aims that will address specific urgent issues and leverage scarce CERTs resources into independently sustainable projects. It will bring together outstanding interdisciplinary expertise with infrastructure to enable teams to effectively utilize large, complex healthcare datasets and communicate effectively with a variety of constituencies to translate research into practice. It aims to become a national resource on mental health therapeutics, trusted for its expertise and its independent, rigorous, and objective work. It will bring together outstanding research teams to develop and implement strategies for improving treatment patterns and outcomes in problem areas selected for impact on a population basis, emphasizing the large populations receiving care through major public programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Work of the cores and projects will be organized around seven initiatives developed in the planning stage as areas of high potential impact for CERTs work: Toward Safer, More-Effective Treatment of Childhood Depression; Balancing Risks and Benefits in Childhood Antipsychotic Use; Guideline Development and Prescriber Training for Better Childhood Mental Health Treatment and Outcomes: A Two-State Initiative; Reducing the Duration Gap to Improve Adult Schizophrenia Outcomes; Improving Psychotropic Use Among Frail Elderly and Adults with Medical Illnesses; Furthering Guideline-Consistent Management of Antidepressant Treatment in Community Adult and Elderly Populations; and Assessing and Addressing Medicare Modernization Act Impacts for Beneficiaries with Mental Illness. Work in each area will move systematically from research to practice, emphasizing policy-level interventions of broad impact. Building on a strong experience base in analyzing administrative healthcare datasets, the Center will develop and manage extensive multistate public-payer research datasets supporting multiple related studies, and integrate these studies with education and interventions to improve practice and outcomes in targeted areas.