The Mental Health Research Network conducts practice-based mental health research in large healthcare systems serving over 25 million patients in 16 states. The network has the potential to dramatically improve the speed, efficiency, relevance and impact of mental health clinical and services research. A primary aim of this network is to have large-scale data infrastructure available for rapid analysis. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare systems quickly changed from using mostly in-person clinic visits to telehealth visits that use phone or video to care for patients. However, we do not know how the change to telehealth affects people with mental health conditions.

This supplemental application uses the infrastructure of the Mental Health Research Network to examine how changing from office visits to telehealth visits disrupts care of people with mental health conditions in three healthcare systems. We want to understand how this change to telehealth may affect people differently, including people of racial or ethnic minority groups, patients who speak a language other than English at home, children or teenagers, older adults, people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, people living in rural areas, or people living in areas with low income or education. We also want to understand how these changes affect the severity of someone’s anxiety or depression, whether they keep taking their mental health medications or continue going to therapy, whether they visit the emergency department or need to be hospitalized in the mental health unit, or whether they have increased risk to attempt suicide.