California Collaborative Network to Promote Data Driven Care and Improve Outcomes in Early Psychosis (EPI-CAL)

Principal Investigator:

Tara A. Niendam, PhD

Overview

The University of California, Davis created EPI-CAL based on prior collaborations with 30 California early psychosis (EP) programs as well as experiences using mobile health technology to measure individual outcomes in EP care. EPI-CAL is a network of EP programs that will contribute systematically collected outcomes data on approximately 1,000 clinical high risk or first episode psychosis clients per year from six community and six university EP clinics. The hub is using a custom, EP-focused technology platform (mHealth) to collect core client outcomes and metrics of data use for treatment decisions at the client, program, and state levels. The use of mHealth will allow easy data analysis, interpretation, and dissemination.

See the full list of EPI-CAL clinics

Excited man piggybacking friend with woman in background at beach

Features

A young woman sits in a circle with her counseling support group. She holds a water bottle as she leans forward and shares a humorous story.

EPI-CAL is a unified network of 18 California EP programs formed to standardize practice and support knowledge-sharing. The Hub uses an EP-focused technology platform to:

Support measurement-based care.
Harmonize core outcomes to enable large-scale evaluation of over 1,000 clients.
Enable participation for clients and families across 13 languages.
Collect and visualize client-level data across a variety of recovery-oriented measures.
Empower consumers to use their own data in care decisions.
Provide program leadership with immediate access to relevant outcomes that can be quickly disseminated to stakeholders or shift program practice.

EPI-CAL is also developing and testing a measure of duration of untreated psychosis for use in community settings.