VIDEO: Insurance data may identify children, adolescents with mental health conditions

SAN FRANCISCO — Insurance claims data may help identify children and adolescents at risk for neurodevelopmental conditions, according to a presenter at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting.

“At the population level we have so many types of data we can use to identify patients with early onset disease, like electronic health records and insurance claims data, and the idea is we want to use these types of data sets to identify patients who may be at risk for a certain disorder, facilitate diagnosis or treatment, and ideally one day develop risk profiles to predict who might be at risk for adverse events or outcomes,” Nicole Benson, MD, child and adolescent psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, said in this Healio video.

Benson added that people often change insurers, which can make it challenging to have the entire history of a patient.

“You really need to review several years, maybe even up to 4 or more, to really feel confident that the diagnosis you’re seeing is a first diagnosis for that individual,” Benson said.