Assessing practical implementation of modular psychotherapy for youth in community-based settings using benchmarking

Background Achieving high quality outcomes in a community context requires the strategic coordination of many activities in a service system, involving families, clinicians, supervisors, and administrators. In modern implementation trials, the therapy itself is guided by a treatment manual; however, structured supports for other parts of the service system may remain less well-articulated (e.g., supervision, administrative policies for planning and review, information/feedback flow, resource availability). This implementation trial investigated how a psychosocial intervention performed when those non-therapy supports were not structured by a research team, but were instead provided as part of a scalable industrial implementation, testing whether outcomes achieved would meet benchmarks from published research trials. Method In this single-arm observational benchmarking study, a total of 59 community clinicians were trained in the Modular Approach to Therapy for Children (MATCH) treatment program. These clinicians delivered MATCH treatment to 166 youth ages 6 to 17 naturally presenting for psychotherapy services. Clinicians received substantially fewer supports from the treatment developers or research team than in the original MATCH trials and instead relied on explicit process management tools to facilitate implementation. Prior RCTs of MATCH were used to benchmark the results of the current initiative. Client improvement was assessed using the Top Problems Assessment and Brief Problem Monitor. Results Analysis of client symptom change indicated that youth experienced improvement equal to or better than the experimental condition in published research trials. Similarly, caregiver-reported outcomes were generally comparable to those in published trials. Conclusions Although results must be interpreted cautiously, they support the feasibility of using process management tools to facilitate the successful implementation of MATCH outside the context of a formal research or funded implementation trial. Further, these results illustrate the value of benchmarking as a method to evaluation industrial implementation efforts. Plain Language Summary: Randomized effectiveness trials are inclusive of clinicians and cases that are routinely encountered in community-based settings, while continuing to rely on the research team for both clinical and administrative guidance. As a result, the field still struggles to understand what might be needed to support sustainable im