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Illness Severity And Clinical Instability Are Critical For Predicting Risk Of Psychiatric Hospitalization Across A Wide Range Of Diagnoses, New Research Finds

Jacob Lund - stock.adobe.com - illustrative purposes only, not the actual people

According to a new study published in The Lancet Psychiatry, illness severity and clinical instability are two critical factors for predicting future hospitalization risk among patients with psychiatric conditions.

This finding could be integral for behavioral health care and research, impacting how early interventions are facilitated to the development of treatments that are more targeted.

The study was conducted by researchers affiliated with Holmusk, a behavioral health and data analytics company. So, they utilized Holmusk’s NeuroBlu Database– a data source containing the electronic health records of over 1.4 million U.S. patients who received care for behavioral health conditions.

The team used this data to examine relationships between instability, clinical severity, and psychiatric hospitalization– ultimately resulting in the first-ever study to explore if early clinical trajectory might predict psychiatric hospitalization across various diagnoses.

Following the study’s publication in the medical journal, the researchers’ findings were also presented to the European Congress of Psychiatry in Paris and the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy in San Antonio.

“Our vision in creating the NeuroBlu Database was to provide the gold standard for behavioral health real-world data,” said Founder and CEO of Holmusk, Nawal Roy.

“Findings like these validate that this vision is being realized. Even more importantly, they underscore the importance of developing standardized measures across behavioral health care in order to improve patient care and outcomes.”

Led by Maxime Taquet, a clinical psychiatrist and senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, the team discovered that if patients experienced instability and severe illness during the first two months of clinical encounters, then they faced a drastically higher risk of undergoing psychiatric hospitalization within six months.

Moreover, the patients who ranked in the top half for instability and clinical severity had an increased risk of hospitalization at 45%.

Jacob Lund – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual people

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