Does Practice Make Perfect? The Effects of an Eight-Week Manualized Deliberate Practice Course With Peer Feedback on Patient-Rated Working Alliance in Adults: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Deliberate Practice (DP), which underscores the importance of expert mentorship, personalized learning objectives, feedback, and repetition, has been suggested as a method to enhance the effectiveness of therapists.

Method: The study tested the efficacy of an eight-week, structured, group-based online course, enriched with peer feedback, for 37 Cognitive Behavioral Therapists. The goal was to assess whether this intervention could boost the quality of therapist-patient alliances, as compared to a control group.

Responding to Key Process Markers as a Focus of Psychotherapy Training and Practice.

Historically, evidence-based psychotherapy training has favored the standardized application of discrete treatment packages, with key outcomes being the therapist's adherence to and competent delivery of theory-prescribed ingredients. However, this model often fails to align with the priorities and values of clinicians, and research casts doubt on the notion that a therapist's faithful application of treatment protocols is a valid index of clinical expertise. Considering this, training and practice models that emphasize evidence-based clinician flexibility and patient-centered tailoring of interventions are receiving increased attention.

Therapist-Level Moderators of Patient-Therapist Match Effectiveness in Community Psychotherapy.

Based on patient-reported outcomes data analyzed at the provider level, there is evidence that psychotherapists can possess effectiveness strengths and weaknesses when treating patients with different presenting concerns. These within-therapist differences hold promise for personalizing care by prospectively matching patients to therapists' historical effectiveness strengths. In a double-masked randomized controlled trial (RCT; NCT02990000), such matching outperformed pragmatically determined usual case assignment-which leaves personalized, measurement-based matching to chance-in naturalistic outpatient psychotherapy (Constantino et al.

A refreshing and necessary start: Commentary on Westra and Di Bartolomeo (2024).

Westra and Di Bartolomeo (2024) make a compelling case for integrating "process acuity" skills into routine clinical training. The authors have done the field a service by articulating the need for novel and process-science-informed psychotherapy training and practice. This brief commentary echoes the authors' observations about the status quo of clinical training and expands upon what else will need to be considered to fully realize the goals of their proposal.

Routine Outcome Monitoring and Clinical Feedback in Psychotherapy: Recent Advances and Future Directions.

In the past decade, there has been an increase in research related to the routine collection and active use of standardized patient data in psychotherapy. Research has increasingly focused on personalization of care to patients, clinical skills and interventions that modulate treatment outcomes, and implementation strategies, all of which appear to enhance the beneficial effects of ROM and feedback. In this article, we summarize trends and recent advances in the research on this topic and identify several essential directions for the field in the short to medium term.

Therapeutic techniques and session impact: A practice-research network study in private practice.

This study investigated the relationship between therapeutic techniques and session impact, by examining the replicability of findings observed in a university-based training clinic (Boswell et al., 2010) in another practice-oriented setting: private practice.  = 8 therapists completed session-level assessments of their technique use for  = 38 clients.

A Qualitative Analysis of Stakeholder Attitudes Regarding Personalized Provider Selection and Patient-Therapist Matching.

This study explored mental health care patients and therapists' perspectives on using therapists' measurement-based and problem-specific effectiveness data to inform case assignments - a type of treatment personalization that has been shown to outperform non-measurement-based case assignment as usual (Constantino et al., 2021). We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 8 patients (75% women; M age = 33.

Implementation Science and Practice-Oriented Research: Convergence and Complementarity.

Implementation science is the scientific study of methods to promote the uptake of research findings and other evidence-based practices in routine care, with the goal of improving the quality and effectiveness of health services (Bauer et al., 2015). In addition to this common goal, practice-oriented psychotherapy research (and researchers) and implementation science (and scientists) share a common focus on the people and the places where treatment happens.

Outcome trajectories in a county mental health clinic before and after telemental health: a retrospective COVID-19 cohort study.

Background/objectives: Telemental health (TMH) care has received increased attention, most recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many treatment settings and clinicians were forced to rapidly shift to TMH modalities, including clinicians with limited exposure to and possibly negative attitudes toward alternative treatment delivery formats. With the shift to new modalities, effectiveness research is necessary to understand if patients are receiving the same quality of care as before the pandemic and their receipt of mostly in person services.

Revisiting our approach to behavioral health referrals.

This system of matching referrals to behavioral health practitioners' historical effectiveness seeks to strengthen patient outcomes.

A baseline comparison of three diagnostic groups using the Progress Monitoring Tool for Eating Disorders.

Utilisation of intensive inpatient treatment for eating disorders (EDs) has climbed in the last decade, illuminating a need for better consensus on what constitutes effective treatment and context-appropriate progress/outcome monitoring during residential stays. The novel Progress Monitoring Tool for Eating Disorders (PMED) measure is specifically designed for inpatient settings. Previous research supports the factorial validity and internal consistency of the PMED; however, additional work is needed to determine its appropriateness for complex patient populations.

Therapist perceptions of their own measurement-based, problem-specific effectiveness.

Objective: Patient-reported outcomes data reveal differences both in therapists' global effectiveness across their average patient (between-therapist effect) and in treating different problems within their caseload (within-therapist effects). Yet, it is unclear how accurately therapists perceive their own measurement-based, problem-specific effectiveness and whether such self-perceptions predict global between-therapist performance differences. We explored these questions in naturalistic psychotherapy.

Trajectories of interpersonal problems in residential eating disorder treatment: Exploring the influence of primary diagnosis.

Baseline interpersonal problems have been associated with treatment outcome in eating disorders (ED) and are important for understanding ED maintenance and aetiology. Despite this evidence, little is known about trajectories of change in interpersonal problems in the context of treatment, particularly in intensive ED treatment. This study examined the trajectory of total interpersonal problems in residential ED treatment, as well as two subdomains previously highlighted in ED research of being overly Cold (interpersonally distant) or overly Domineering (interpersonally controlling), as a function of different primary presenting ED diagnoses: anorexia nervosa restricting subtype (AN-R), binge-purge subtype (AN-BP), and bulimia nervosa or binge eating (BN/BED).

The need for a measurement-based care professional practice guideline.

Professional practice guidelines (PPGs) are intended to promote a high level of professional practice and serve as an educational resource, providing pragmatic guidance in a clinical area for psychologists. Measurement-based care (MBC) is an evidence-based psychological practice with accumulating empirical support and alignment with patient-centered care. In connection with the American Psychological Association's Advisory Committee for Measurement-based Care and the Mental and Behavioral Health Registry, this article outlines various lines of support for the development and implementation of an MBC PPG.

Baseline overly accommodating interpersonal problems in relation to parsed alliance-outcome associations in cognitive behavioral therapy for generalized anxiety disorder.

Given its interpersonal underpinnings, relational factors may be salient in psychotherapy for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Supporting this point, research has indicated a positive alliance-improvement correlation in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for GAD. However, less research has disaggregated this correlation into within- and between-patient components, or examined theory-informed ways in which patient characteristics influence to these components.

Patient-therapist expectancy convergence and outcome in naturalistic psychotherapy.

Research on close relationships demonstrates that dyadic convergence, or two people becoming more similar in their experiences and/or beliefs over time, is commonplace and adaptive. As psychotherapy involves a close relationship, patient-therapist convergence processes may influence treatment-specific outcomes. Although prior research supports that patients and therapists tend to converge on their alliance perspectives over time, which associates with subsequent patient improvement, no research has similarly examined convergence during therapy.

Clinician perceptions of nomothetic and individualized patient-reported outcome measures in measurement-based care.

: Measurement-based care (MBC), which encompasses routine outcome monitoring (ROM) and measurement feedback systems (MFSs), is an evidence-based practice (EBP) supporting treatment personalization and clinical responsiveness. Despite MBC's effectiveness, clinicians report reservations regarding its utility, which may be a function of overreliance on nomothetic (i.e.

Skill Acquisition During Transdiagnostic Treatment With the Unified Protocol.

The Unified Protocol (UP) for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders is an emotion-focused, cognitive-behavioral intervention developed to address the full range of anxiety, depressive, and related disorders. The UP consists of core therapeutic skills that, though unique in focus, are each designed to promote an approach-oriented stance toward emotional experiences. The goal of the present investigation was to characterize changes in these skills for patients that received a course of treatment with the UP, as well as to examine associations between skills and symptoms changes.

Therapist-level moderation of within- and between-therapist process-outcome associations.

Objective: Although higher quality patient-therapist alliance and more positive patient outcome expectation (OE) consistently predict symptomatic/functional improvement in psychotherapy, most research has failed to capture the nuance in these process-outcome relations by parsing them into (i.e., differences between patients treated by the same therapist) and (i.

For whom does a match matter most? Patient-level moderators of evidence-based patient-therapist matching.

Objective: A double-blind, randomized controlled trial tested the effectiveness of a personalized Match System in which patients are assigned to therapists with a "track record" of effectively treating a given patient's primary concern(s) (e.g., anxiety).

Effect of Matching Therapists to Patients vs Assignment as Usual on Adult Psychotherapy Outcomes: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Psychotherapists possess strengths and weaknesses in treating different mental health problems, yet performance information is rarely harnessed in mental health care (MHC). To our knowledge, no prior studies have tested the causal efficacy of prospectively matching patients to therapists with empirically derived strengths in treating patients' specific concerns.

Objective: To test the effect of measurement-based matching vs case assignment as usual (CAU) on psychotherapy outcomes.

Prediction of eating disorder treatment response trajectories via machine learning does not improve performance versus a simpler regression approach.

Objective: Patterns of response to eating disorder (ED) treatment are heterogeneous. Advance knowledge of a patient's expected course may inform precision medicine for ED treatment. This study explored the feasibility of applying machine learning to generate personalized predictions of symptom trajectories among patients receiving treatment for EDs, and compared model performance to a simpler logistic regression prediction model.

The Renfrew Unified Treatment for Eating Disorders and Comorbidity: Long-Term Effects of an Evidence-Based Practice Implementation in Residential Treatment.

The Renfrew Unified Treatment for Eating Disorders and Comorbidity (UT) is a transdiagnostic, emotion-focused treatment adapted for use in residential group treatment. This study examined the effect of UT implementation across five years of treatment delivery. Data were collected by questionnaire at admission, discharge (DC), and 6-month follow-up (6MFU).

Therapist and client attitudes toward client independent review of psychotherapy sessions.

Objectives: Little consideration has been given to the possibility that clients may find therapeutic value in reviewing (i.e., watching, listening, or reading transcripts of) their own therapy sessions independently.