Prescribing therapeutic interventions through Strategic Treatment Selection

Abstract

This article describes the rationale and current research on Systematic Treatment Selection, a method for matching and fitting interventions to patients and patient problems. An efficient method of treatment planning must not only use effective and empirically tested procedures, but should take into account the fit of these procedures with important nondiagnostic information about the patient, and aspects of the patient's environment. The effort to transfer research-based treatment manuals to clinical practice has often failed because it requires therapists to give up procedures and theories that have been accepted on the basis of clinical experience and fails to consider ways in which patient qualities affect the fit of the treatment. Systematic Treatment Selection and its derivative, Prescriptive Therapy, seeks to overcome these difficulties by empirically defining general principles of treatment intervention and selection that cut across therapist theoretical orientation and capitalize on the selection and use of methods that are favored by the clinician.