The Hol Picture

The HM Treasury in the United Kingdom recently announced an exciting and truly forward-looking initiative for healthcare: a package of government funding, called the Life Sci for Growth package, to fuel research and bring treatments to patients faster. There are many impressive projects being funded, from clinical trial improvements to preparation efforts for future public health emergencies. 

Consider an emergency room doctor who is caring for a patient who has been hospitalized after a suicide attempt. When she consults his chart, she can see that he has been diagnosed with depression, but the structured data that is immediately available does not provide much additional context. 

Huge amounts of data are collected throughout a person’s journey through the behavioral healthcare system. From demographic data captured during intake to in-depth conversations between patients and clinicians about symptoms, daily activities, and goals, most of the information captured about a patient becomes part of their electronic health record (EHR). 

Imagine that you are a therapist seeing a new patient for the first time. The patient says that while she has no history of clinical depression, she has been feeling really sad lately and has lost interest in the things she normally enjoys, such as cooking and creating new recipes. 

When you start to ask questions, however, you begin to uncover the factors that may be impacting what your patient is currently experiencing. She tells you she has recently moved across the country and has had trouble finding a new community where she feels connected. Because she feels so sad most of the time, she has stopped calling anyone from her previous home, telling you that she “doesn’t want to bring them down.” You hypothesize that the recent drastic changes in her environment may be contributing to the symptoms of depression she describes.

I was honored to take the stage at the National Medical Research Council’s Awards Ceremony and Research Symposium in Singapore recently to speak about ongoing challenges in behavioral health, and the momentum we have in the market to address these challenges.

As a mental health clinician and researcher, I have seen firsthand how our understanding of the role that biological and socioenvironmental factors play in mental health has evolved over time. For many years, the debate over nature vs. nurture dominated discussions in the field, but more recent models have focused on the interaction between genes and the environment, such as the diathesis stress model.

I recently led a team of researchers in a large-scale observational study, which was accepted and published by The Lancet Psychiatry. To our knowledge, our study was the first to study the impact of early clinical trajectory across multiple psychiatric diagnoses.

I recently had the pleasure of joining Real-World Wednesday, a conversation hosted weekly on Clubhouse covering various topics about real-world data. First off, I’d like to thank the hosts of the RWD-RWE Club, Matt Veatch and Aaron Kamauu, for the invitation and the engaging discussion.

Today, Digital Health New York (DHNY) released its Q1 Healthcare Innovation Report, of which we were honored to be a part.

At Holmusk, our vision is to provide fit-for-purpose real-world data that fuel research and innovation in behavioral health. With tons of data captured each day as patients move through healthcare systems—much of it in unstructured data fields—a lot goes on behind the scenes, as we ensure that this information is available and usable for research. Below, you’ll find a quick overview on the types of data that are included in the NeuroBlu Database—as well as the process data go through to ensure they are fit-for-purpose.