In this white paper we aim to provide a short overview of the research underpinning the upcoming matching feature in Konfidens.
Konfidens’ solution pulls on several strands of research. The most important areas being research on data informed matching, therapeutic alliance, facilitative interpersonal skills and routine outcome measurements.
Unlike in traditional medicine, where a patient is healed by identifying the right diagnosis and prescribe the corresponding medicine, in mental health it is the personal capabilities of the therapist that is the treatment. Due to this dependency on personal abilities, therapists are often more accurately compared to top athletes. Just like athletes excel in different disciplines and some are consequently better than others, this is also found to be true for mental health therapists. Based on this analogy, it may come as no surprise that the choice of therapist matters to optimise treatment outcomes.
<aside> đź“– A great introduction to the topic can be found here. [7]
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Significant research within the field of psychometrics has been directed towards identifying a patients problem areas and tracking how they’re psychological distress develops over time, also called routine outcome measurements (ROM). The goal is to provide the therapist with insights into how the treatment is progressing and track the outcomes. Introducing instruments for routine outcome measurement is in itself found to increase recovery rates from 20%-50%, and reduce deterioration in at-risk cases from 21% to 6% [5].
Therapeutic alliance is a term that is used to describe the relationship between a healthcare professional and a patient. A solid alliance is believed to be a prerequisite for successful treatment. Some studies find that the alliance may explain as much as 14.7% of the variance in treatment outcomes between therapists [1]. The alliance is usually measured with a validated psychometric test.
Facilitative interpersonal skills is an attempt to operationalise the personal capabilities of a therapist believed to impact the therapy outcome for patients (such as empathy, warmth, building expectations, etc.). It seems that therapist effects can explain 5%–9% of the outcome variance [4]. The therapists skills are found to effect both the therapeutic alliance and treatment outcome.
With the recent trend in psychological research finding that the therapist-client alliance and the therapists skills are the key determinants of patient outcomes, a new direction of research has emerged: data informed matching. Based on the assumption that certain therapists appear to be particularly effective with certain types of patients and less effective with others, matching patients to therapists based on historical outcome data has proven to significantly increase the rate of patient improvement [6].