AMHERST, Mass. – A psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was awarded $4.6 million funding award from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to implement a program that matches mental health patients with psychotherapists based on the therapist’s previously established efficacy strengths.
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Michael Constantineprofessor of psychological and brain sciences, led the first randomized clinical trial of its kind – also funded by PCORI – which found that patients intentionally matched with therapists who had a strong track record in treating patients’ top concerns had about twice as much improvement as patients assigned case-as-usual , where the coincidence occurred only by chance.
For the current award, Constantino and his team of academic, industry and clinical partners will implement a phase one evidence-based matchmaking program with a large mental health care network in the Philadelphia area, Springfield Psychological. After that, in phase two, the protocol for patient-therapist matching, optimized based on scientific dissemination results from phase 1, will be implemented throughout the Refresh Mental Health network in approximately 50 health care centers mental in more than 30 states.
This psychotherapy program is part of a PCORI-funded portfolio of projects that aim to improve awareness, acceptance, and use of the results of patient-centered comparative effectiveness research.
Chosen through a highly competitive review process, the winners’ proposals were judged on the importance of sharing and implementing the findings and the project’s potential to drive practice change and improvements in healthcare and health outcomes. The PCORI Board approved the Constantino award pending the completion of a business and programmatic review by PCORI staff and the issuance of a formal award contract.
“Even the most shocking findings from clinical research studies can take years to become widespread clinical practice,” says PCORI in announcing the award. “Reducing that lag time and paving the way to acceptance is the focus of this PCORI-funded project.”
“The beauty of the PCORI mechanism is that they want to fund good science and then they also want to fund the clinical translation of that science,” says Constantino.
In Constantine’s original research, the “coincidence effect” was found to be even more beneficial and pronounced for patients who identified themselves as racial or ethnic minorities.
“This will be one of the focuses of our implementation project: addressing some of the disparities in mental health quality that we see in the field, which means that patients from underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities often receive less effective treatments.” says Constantine. “This is a means of trying to address that.”
The matching is based on a multidimensional outcome tool called the Treatment Outcomes Package (TOP), which assesses 12 symptom or functional domains: depression, quality of life, mania, panic or somatic anxiety, psychosis, substance abuse, social conflict, sexual functioning, sleep, suicide, violence and work functioning.
Once a therapist has at least 15 patients completing a TOP before and after treatment, a “report card” is established that shows the therapist’s strengths and weaknesses in treating all 12 domains. This information can be used for prospective comparison of new cases with the areas of efficacy determined by the therapist’s measurement.
“There are a lot of sites on Refresh Mental Health that aren’t using TOP yet, so in phase two we’ll be able to really demonstrate what it’s like to go from A to Z if you’re a mental health network that wants to start using our TOP system. matchmaking,” Constantino says.
PCORI is an independent, nonprofit organization authorized by Congress in 2010 to fund research that will provide patients, their caregivers and physicians, and other health care decision makers with the evidence-based information needed to make better health care decisions. informed.
