Combining local aggregate and treatment research findings to inform clinical decision making in youth mental health care

Abstract

Many mental health practitioners have been reluctant to incorporate findings from randomized control trials (RCTs) into their community care treatment approaches. This reluctance might arise from perceptions that treatment manuals are too inflexible or that recommendations from the research literature do not apply to their own service settings. At present, there are no easily accessible clinical decision making tools that allow for the integration of both research and local findings in treatment planning. Local aggregate evidence is defined as case-specific data aggregated across multiple clients into meaningful composite units (Daleiden & Chorpita, 2005). Thus, the present study aims to describe the development and design of a set of clinical decision making tools that visually depict distilled treatment research findings along with data aggregated from local service patterns related to a variety of specific treatment targets. These tools allow community care providers and stakeholders to simultaneously consider both sets of evidence in pertinent clinical decision making situations (e.g., at treatment start, when treatment is not progressing). Sample findings are presented across different treatment targets and levels of care. Implications for case planning and case review, system of care improvement, and future RCT research are discussed.