Abstract
There is a clear need within the mental health field for methods to facilitate the routine collection of treatment outcome data (Barlow, Hayes, & Nelson, 1984; Moreland, Fowler, & Honaker, 1994). Such methods could be used to address increasing concerns about the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of mental health services raised by the government and third party payers by enabling practitioners to document the effectiveness of their interventions (Banta & Saxe, 1983). By continuously tracking clients’ progress during treatment, practitioners could determine if a particular treatment plan is achieving its desired goals and could implement changes as needed. In addition to examining the impact of treatment on individual cases, aggregating these data across cases could provide a basis for more naturalistic research on the effectiveness of psychotherapy outside of typical research settings. Outcome data could also be useful for administrative purposes. For example, individual practitioners could examine their relative success with different types of clients, or community mental health centers could examine the characteristics of the clients they serve.
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Farrell, A.D., McCullough-Vaillant, L. (1996). Computerized Assessment System for Psychotherapy Evaluation and Research (CASPER): Development and Current Status. In: Mental Health Computing. Computers and Medicine. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2352-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2352-8_3
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