Researchers may access administrative healthcare data at AHS to help answer research questions related to Addiction & Mental Health (AMH). We have created a guide to help guide researchers in accessing data, including information on which teams to connect with, administrative processes at AHS required to access data, and the databases available.

View Accessing AMH Data at AHS.

About the Partnership

The AMH Research Hub of AHS has partnered with the Prairies node of Canadian Research Initiative in Substance Misuse (CRISM). This partnership will address research, evaluation, quality improvement, and measurement questions related to substance use. This analytic and research collaboration is opening up administrative data on substance use and is creating a line of sight between applied knowledge generation and research activity. The long-term goals of this partnership are to support researcher access to Addiction & Mental Health client data from acute and specialty health care services and programs, and to promote innovation in analytics.

Call for Proposals

Researchers are invited to submit proposals with a research question that may be answered through AHS AMH data. The overarching purpose is to identify and address mutually agreed upon and mutually beneficial research, evaluation, quality improvement and measurement questions.

CRISM Prairies has funded a full-time analyst to work in the AHS’ Knowledge, Performance and Integrated Planning program. Projects will be categorized as follows:

• Analysis of fully formed research or quality improvement question
• Consultation around development of a question.

Key eligibility points:

• No primary data collection
• Makes use of data already held in AHS or Alberta Health databases
• Proposal must align with CRISM objectives or AHS priorities or both
• Preference will be given to projects in the following order:
  • Aligns with both CRISM objectives and AHS priorities
  • Aligns with CRISM or AHS with some overlap with the other agency
  • Aligns only with CRISM or AHS with no overlap

For more information or to apply, visit CRISM-AHS Analytics Program, CRISM Prairies.

Data access partnership examples:

• Cannabis use and concern among clients enrolled in addiction treatment, CRISM Prairies
• Demographics, comorbidities and service utilization patterns for amphetamine use, CRISM Prairies

To learn more about these projects, visit CRISM-AHS Advancement of Analytics in Addiction, CRISM Prairies.