The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) will invest $100 million in an initiative to collect better data on a patient’s response to mental health treatments and develop more comprehensive quantitative measures that assess outcomes.

Through a project titled EVIDENT, which stands for Evidence-Based Validation and Innovation for Rapid Therapeutics in Behavioral Health, the agency hopes the effort will lead to faster, more precise and personalized mental health treatments.

Under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), ARPA-H will award contracts to groups making measurable progress in the mental health field toward “defined milestones, including data collection, quality, and delivery,” according to a press release.

As part of this, the agency will issue a forthcoming solicitation for longitudinal, deidentified data collected from registered clinical trials on the effects of rapid-acting behavioral health interventions, such as neuromodulation, neuroplastogens and digital therapeutics. The data will be curated and stored in a repository managed by an ARPA-H partner for future research purposes.

“The data from this solicitation also seeks to improve providers’ ability to identify when a specific therapy will be most effective and monitor rapid treatment effects when they are occurring,” the release states. “This will indicate when a treatment is or is not working for an individual, rather than taking a trial-and-error approach, and ultimately, will reduce the burden of mental illness, lower healthcare costs and improve quality of life for millions of Americans.”

Ultimately, after the data solicitation is complete, ARPA-H will analyze it and use it to develop objective measurements of rapid-acting therapies and to support future research that improves clinicians’ ability to identify when a therapeutic modality will be appropriate and most effective for a specific patient.

On its outset, ARPA-H has issued two solicitations for submission and response in December. One calls for proposals that use innovative technologies to examine multimodal data collected around emerging and fast-acting behavioral health interventions, which is due Dec. 22. The second outlines a request for proposals that explicitly measure and deliver longitudinal data from interventional behavioral health clinical trials around fact-acting treatments ranging from psychological, social, digital, or biological data.

The initiative will focus on defining success around four major areas: finding more precise ways to measure progress across mental health conditions and treatments; defining better ways to understand and measure progress and brain activity that happens during therapy or treatment sessions; identifying measures to predict who will benefit from a modality and who may be at risk or have an adverse reaction to one; and using data from relevant clinical studies to build the library database to uncover patterns and use the repository for future research and faster FDA approval of emerging treatments.

The $100 million will be awarded on a rolling basis as proposals are reviewed and accepted. Those chosen for the EVIDENT initiative will also receive active management from ARPA-H and undergo an annual performance review to be considered for continuation in the program.

While proposals are being accepted as of Nov. 24, ARPA-H’s new initiative will officially launch Dec. 10 with an exclusive “Proposers’ Day” event in Washington, D.C. The meeting will not be open to the public or the press for potential candidates to present their data and ask questions about the process.