Quality Improvement in the Private Sector (United Behavioral Health) - Burnam, Feldman, Goldman, Huskamp, Miranda, Arons

One of the thorniest questions facing policymakers and consumers is whether mental health specialists are delivering care of the highest quality. Virtually nothing is known about the quality of psychotherapy in private practice because no careful tools have been devised to measure it. The Network's goal is to develop those tools, starting with care for depression. For this project, the Network collaborates with United Behavioral Health (UBH), a large managed behavioral health care organization with a broad network of mental health specialists. UBH is an ideal partner because of its leading-edge efforts to develop and evaluate quality improvement strategies. This project uses UBH’s claims data to describe how much variation there is in the quality of medication management for depression. It also develops and tests questionnaires for consumers, asking them about the quality and types of care given during their psychotherapy for depression. A similar questionnaire is being developed for specialists, with emphasis on determining whether they deliver evidence-based practices, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and interpersonal therapy. Building on these findings, the project's second phase applies the new tools in order to assess the quality of psychotherapy for depression in a large network of mental health providers.

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Last modified: June 1, 2006
©2006 MacArthur Foundation Network on Mental Health Policy Research
Last Revised: June 2006