Applications of Clinical Informatics to Child Mental Health Care: a Call to Action to Bridge Practice and Training

The second trend is an extremely rapid growth in health data, including patient access to data, and health care decision-making based on health information technology. Clinical Informatics Clinical informatics is the application of informatics (i.e., the study of computational systems for data storage and retrieval) and information technology (i.e., computing technology used in the acquisition, storage, manipulation, display, and transmission of data) to deliver health care services [16, 17]. Examples of applications of clinical informatics in child psychiatry include point-of-care tools (e.g., embedding the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale in the clinician workflow of an EHR), patient-facing portals and patient access to medical records (e.g., open notes), public health surveillance and identification of areas of clinical need (e.g., tracking child mental health acute care utilization during the COVID-19 pandemic), and predictive analytics (e.g., leveraging large multi-site EHR datasets to inform personalized suicide risk prediction) (see Table 1). Shifts in child mental health care delivery during the pandemic also brought a new need for provider tools such as EHR-telehealth integration, conversion of residual paper documentation (e.g., consent forms) to EHR-integrated formats, increased communication between mental health and other medical providers, and flags and banners to identify isolation precautions and vaccination status [27].