EISI: Extended inter-spike interval for mental health patients clustering based on mental health services and medications utilisation

Mental health is vital in all human life stages, and managing mental healthcare service resources is crucial for providers. This paper presents a new method, called Extended Inter-Spike Interval (EISI), on identifying the patients with a similar utilisation of mental health services and medications. The EISI measures the distance between the utilisation patterns of the patients. Then, the pairwise distances are given to a developed split-and-merge Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) clustering algorithm to identify the patients with similar utilisation patterns. To evaluate the proposed method, we use two years (2013–2014) of the 10% publicly available sample of the Australian Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) administrative data. Results show that mental health patients can be grouped into ten clusters with distinct and interpretable utilisations patterns. The largest cluster comprises individuals who only visit general practitioners and take psycholeptics medications for a short time. The smallest group contains occasional visits with general practitioners and regularly utilises psycholeptics and psychoanaleptics medications over long periods. The proposed method provides insights on whom to target and how to structure services for different groups of individuals with mental health conditions.