Author of this blog article: Lucie-May Golbourn-King
Having been mentored by Dr Yasuhiro Kotera since the early stages of my studies, I took great pride in reimagining my first research proposal from five years ago to submit together as the first chapter in my research career for ‘Current and Future Trends in Health and Medical Informatics’ published by Springer Book Series: Studies in Computational Intelligence (SCI).
Agreeing on a reframed research question, Standards for Structure in Clinical Therapy was written, considering integrating informatics solutions within template design. Therapeutic formulation, arguably imperative to effective clinical therapy, is an evolving hypothesis of the influences and causes of a patient’s interpersonal, psychological and behavioural problems allowing for the creation of a semi-structured treatment guide. There are currently several different approaches across different types of therapy.
Questions the chapter aimed to discuss:
How do clinical therapists approach the assessment and decision-making process?
What are the current procedural aspects of formulation?
What would be the benefits to therapeutic outcome, about measurability and effectiveness, if there was an opportunity to integrate set guidelines?
Could health and medical informatics strengthen the implementation of a standardised clinical therapeutic process?
We covered how reliance on deliberate procedures could make the process of assessment too constrained, in turn, limiting therapists. The therapeutic process is open to bias and assumptions relying heavily on human judgment, cultural influences and controversial entities. Current approaches have allowed for varying outcomes promoting the exploration of a universal case conceptualisation tool.
A case conceptualisation framework holds the possibility to:
Guide clinical implementers to develop a thorough and quantifiable strategy for responding to particular categories of mental health disorders.
Offer a tool to measure reliability and quality.
Support funding for policymakers to carry out efforts to streamline mental health services.
Provide opportunities for researchers to compare assessments that are more succinct and similar across mental health problems by removing interpretative differentials and substituting them with more accessible domains.
It has been one of the best opportunities to give a nod of affirmation, not only to how much one can grow on an academic journey but how important some mentors you meet along the way can be to your success.
Thank you Yasu; it is an honour to put your guidance into each paper I publish.
Full text of this chapter can be accessed at
Golbourn-King LM, Kotera Y (2023). Standards for Structure in Clinical Therapy. In Current and Future Trends in Health and Medical Informatics: Design And Analysis of Health/Medical Records (1st ed., Ser. Studies in Computational Intelligence (SCI), pp. 1–13). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42112-9_9