Outpatient Mental Health Tracking

Our objective is to develop an Outpatient Mental Health Tracking System (OMHTS) to monitor the progress of psychotherapy patients with respect to symptoms, functioning and subjective well being. The OMHTS will consist of the following: (1) battery of measures providing for patient self-report and clinician ratings; (2) procedures for collecting these data at selected intervals during treatment; (3) analytic procedures and a normative database to compare an individual's progress with that of similar patients; and (4) software to scan raw data forms, generate reports on the status and progress of individual cases, and the performance of the provider network. The OMHTS will be an innovative product. This product is needed by managed care providers to maintain quality of care standards in the face of cost containment pressures. It will be useful to clinicians and clinical supervisors, utilization review (UR) specialists, and manage care networks. It can be used by these persons to monitor case progress, inform UR decision-making and improved the cost -effectiveness of managed care networks. An OMHTS prototype will be developed and evaluated during Phase I. Specific tasks are to develop OMHTS procedures and materials, establish an OMHTS database, conduct construct validity analysis of OMHTS measures, develop an extended validation plan for Phase II, and develop software to generate individual patient reports.