Dr Anna Moore is Assistant Professor in Child Psychiatry and Medical Informatics in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. Her goal is to develop personalised, preventative clinical pathways for children’s mental health. She is approaching this by harnessing broad data types, including electronic health record, genetic, deep phenotyping and other data types relating to children and young people, and making it available for research purposes in a shared data environment called CADRE (Child and Adolescent Data REsource) (https://dareuk.org.uk/sprint-exemplar-project-fair-treatment/ ).
CADRE has privacy preserving federated analytics capability, enabling access to data across a broad geography. This data will be available for use by trusted professionals to carry out ethically approved research. Dr Moore is using this and other data to develop a range of novel digital tools to support personalised early identification and intervention for childhood mental health conditions. This includes exploring the value of different data types, including genetics. To enable this, she leads the NIHR BioResource’s D-CYPHR (DNA – children and young people’s health resource), the first recallable community of children volunteering to get involved in supporting childhood genetics research (https://bioresource.nihr.ac.uk/dcyphr/ ). To support these innovations, she is addressing a range of important ethical and information governance issues that must be addressed with the public and experts in health services research, ethics, social sciences and policy makers. To allow meaningful, good quality patient and public engagement and involvement, CA:RING (Child and adolescent research involvement for the next generation) has been created (https://ca-ring.co.uk ). This is a diverse community of over 200 young people and parents/guardians from across the country who are passionate about supporting paediatric research. CA:RING is a resource available to all paediatric researchers (including academic, charitable and industry) who would like help to carry out good quality PPIE for their projects. Together, this work is enabling the development of novel pathways for early identification and intervention which aim to shift child and adolescent mental health services towards a preventative approach.
Anna is also currently PI of the NIHR Applied Research Collaborative North Thames’ national evaluation of i-THRIVE, which is exploring how best to deliver whole system, integrated mental health care for children and young people through a 20-site case-control study of its’ implementation.
Anna started developing predictive models as part of her PhD, which identified which mental health patients were more likely to have a longer length of stay in emergency departments. Prior to moving to Cambridge, Anna was Director of Mental Health at UCL Partners where she developed and delivered a strategic plan to improve mental health for a population of four million by taking a system-wide approach supported by data and informatics. During this time she was an NHS Innovation Accelerator Fellow and created and led the national CAMHS transformation programme, i-THRIVE – over 70% of children in England are now cared for by i-THRIVE services.
Anna's ORCID page can be found here.
