Health Informatics and Clinical Decision Support in Psychiatric Care for Vulnerable Populations

Dear Colleagues,

Psychiatric conditions—including posttraumatic stress disorder, psychosis, depression, substance use disorders, and suicide risk—remain leading contributors to global morbidity and mortality. These challenges disproportionately affect vulnerable populations, including veterans, women, racial and ethnic minorities, individuals living in poverty, and communities with limited healthcare access. Despite advances in psychiatric research, gaps persist in translating evidence into timely, equitable, and patient-centered care.

Health informatics offers powerful tools to close these gaps. Clinical decision support systems, natural language processing, AI-driven risk stratification, and digital patient-reported outcomes can inform high-stakes psychiatric care decisions and guide interventions in real-world settings. Yet many innovations remain insufficiently validated, poorly adapted to diverse populations, or underutilized in clinical practice.

This Special Issue of Healthcare invites theoretical, empirical, and review papers that advance the science and practice of health informatics in psychiatric care for vulnerable populations. We especially encourage contributions that emphasize validation of tools, integration into health systems, patient-centered design, and approaches that address equity and inclusiveness in mental health decision-making. By bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, this Special Issue seeks to bring informatics solutions to improve psychiatric care and outcomes for those most in need.

Dr. Amar D. Mandavia
Dr. Anne N. Banducci
Dr. Enrique Gutiérrez
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.