The Canadian Youth Mental Health Insight (CYMHI) Platform: Optimizing mental health for youth across Canada through open data, machine learning, and knowledge exchange

Our aim is to optimise mental health for youth across Canada, by providing a state-of-the-art informatics platform to support knowledge and data integration, open data, machine learning and improved communication between stakeholders – the Canadian Youth Mental Health Insight Platform. The platform will transform research and enable knowledge discovery, exchange and innovation between population and community-based prevention programs, integrated youth services networks, and large-scale research studies. The project will engage youth, family members, clinicians, service providers, policymakers, researchers, biomedical scientists, and data scientists from throughout Canada who will collectively design, build, and use the platform. Impact of the platform will be demonstrated through three core projects: personalised services recommender to match users to available services, precision predictive modelling to provide personalised trajectory prediction for decision support, and establishing a national youth mental health atlas to enable proactive data-driven policy decisions. Platform governance is of paramount importance and will balance engagement, privacy and integration, harmonising outcome measures and data collection, and facilitating analysis and prediction to support continuous program and system improvement in a learning health system committed to the principles of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI).