Implementing Algorithmic Crisis Alerts in mHealth Systems for Veterans with PTSD.

This paper seeks to establish a machine learning driven method by which a military veteran with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is classified as being in a crisis situation or not, based upon a given set of criteria. Optimizing alerting decision rules is critical to ensure that veterans at highest risk for mental health crisis rapidly receive additional attention. Subject matter experts in our team (a psychologist, a medical anthropologist, and an expert veteran), defined acute crisis, early warning signs and long-term crisis from this dataset. First, we used a decision tree to find an early time point when the peer mentors (who are also veterans) need to observe the behavior of veterans to make a decision about conducting an intervention. Three different machine learning algorithms were used to predict long term crisis using acute crisis and early warning signs within the determined time point.