Mental Health Information Reporting Assistant (MHIRA)

Our aim is to improve mental health care for adolescents and adults and to include low-resource mental health care settings. Our strategy is to facilitate clinical work by providing an electronic solution to collect and manage patient data. MHIRA stands for ‘Mental Health Information Reporting Assistant’. Our general hypothesis is that evidence-based assessment constitutes a first step towards early detection and successful early treatment of disorders which, if left untreated, will usually have an heavy impact on the adolescent and lower his or her chances to conduct a productive and fulfilled life as an adult. As an electronic and open-source solution, MHIRA makes assessment procedures flexible and affordable in low-resource contexts. The electronic data format aims at generating automatic reports which can be customised for the implementing centres. Importantly, the project aims at facilitating the participation of mental health professionals from low-resource settings in international research activities. We aim to connect different contexts worldwide to find strategies to close the treatment gap in adolescent mental health care. We believe that low-resource contexts need to participate in research to find appropriate solutions for these contexts.