Research into a cognitive model of classification and clinical decision making was used to produce a web-based clinical decision support system for assessing the risks associated with mental-health problems. New methods of eliciting clinical expertise were devised so that the cognitive model could encapsulate multidisciplinary consensus and disseminate it across different clinical services and contexts.
The goal was to provide universal access to validated expert advice on risk judgements that could be clearly understood by people without a specialist mental-health background and be flexibly presented according to end-user requirements. The output is the GRiST risk-assessment tool that has versions being used by NHS secondary mental-health trusts, private hospitals, charities, primary care IAPT services, and service users for self-assessment, covering patients across the age range, from children to older adults.
GRiST has been used in the US, is part of an ongoing collaboration with Boston Medical School, and is about to be linked with a patient record system for primary-care services.
See Christopher Buckingham's Publications for many of the GRiST papers, some of which we have also added to the Research Documents link in the menu on the left.