IMPROVING QUALITY IN PSYCHOTHERAPY

Quality improvement in psychotherapy is a timely endeavor. The often m aligned managed care movement may have the effect of stimulating highe r quality outpatient care. Quality Improvement and quality assurance s hould be contrasted: Quality assurance is argued to be counterproducti ve and inefficient, quality improvement is relevant and useful. Qualit y improvement may stimulate better compliance with treatment protocols . Academic clinical psychology has produced treatment protocols and in dicators of good psychotherapy but these are widely ignored by the pra cticing psychotherapist as unwieldy and impractical. Continuous Qualit y Improvement is a behavioral data-driven technology that can be appli ed to mental health services. The present article gives an example of nonadversarial data-driven process and outcome improvements. A shift o f paradigm toward feedback loops in psychotherapy, collecting data of therapeutic change and patient satisfaction at each session, guides th erapy. Data collected cannot only help guide the individual sessions a nd can be collected to establish a dose-effect relationship for a part icular therapist, or for a clinic or group. Such information has been used to eliminate outpatient managed care.