Online Platform to Help Mental Health Practitioners Implement EBPs

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our ultimate goal is to build PracticeGround, a commercially successful online platform that has the potential to improve outcomes for patients receiving mental health treatment by increasing practitioners' implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs) and speeding the study of dissemination and implementation of EBPs. When completed, PracticeGround will provide the technical infrastructure to deliver online training and consultation in any EBP while measuring patients' response to it and practitioners' implementation of it. Practice Ground already has two components: a beta continuing education site offering online education to practitioners and an active international EBP Learning Community with over 170 paying members. In Phase I we plan to build and test a third component, Online Progress Tracking (OPT). OPT will seamlessly link an online assessment engine that gathers and displays progress monitoring (PM) data from patients and practitioners with online EBP training, expert consultation, and peer community to work like a GPS, locating the progress of the therapy or training process relative to benchmarks, and providing context-specific assistance when practitioners need help implementing or learning EBPs and serveas a platform for implementation research. Specific aims of this project are to design the OPT prototype, conduct user testing to identify the key feasibility and acceptability barriers to professionals' and patients' use of OPT, improve OPT's design to address stakeholder's implementation barriers, and then carry out further user testing and a pilot study to test whether the OPT prototype is acceptable to practitioners in diverse practice and training settings and increases their implementation of the EBPof PM. By the end of Phase I, we will have a saleable product. In Phases II and III we will expand our platform to other EBPs, expand our marketing of the platform, and carry out studies to test the hypothesis that OPT leads to improved patient outcomes.PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Our ultimate goal is to build PracticeGround, a commercially successful online platform that aims to improve outcomes for mental health patients by increasing practitioners' implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs) and speeding the study of dissemination and implementation of EBPs. In this project we build and test the prototype of Online Progress Tracking (OPT), a central component of the PracticeGround platform. OPT will seamlessly link an online assessment engine that gathers and displays progress monitoring data with online EBP training, expert consultation, and peer community to work like a GPS, locating the progress of the therapy relative to benchmarks, and providing assistance when practitioners need help implementing or learning EBPs.