Building a Learning Health System-Focused Trusted Research Environment for Mental Health

Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are increasingly used as platforms for secure health data research, but they can also be used for implementing research findings or for action-research (researchers supporting health professionals to solve problems with advanced data analytics). Most TREs have been designed to support analysis of well-structured and coded data, however, with much clinical data recorded as unstructured notes, especially in mental health care, there needs to be a greater variety of tools and data management services available for safe research that includes natural language processing and anonymisation of data sources. The Mental Health Research for Innovation Centre (M-RIC), co-hosted by the University of Liverpool and Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, has implemented a novel TRE design that incorporates modern data engineering concepts to improve how researchers access a wider variety of linked data and machine learning tools, to be able to both undertake research and then deploy these tools directly into mental health care.