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NIMH grants $6.4 million to develop mental health center at Penn
Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania recently received $6.4 million in funding from the NIMH to create a new center dedicated to improving mental health service delivery via behavioral economics and implementation science.
The center will be led by Rinad Beidas, PhD, director of Implementation Research, David Mandell, ScD, director of Penn’s Center for Mental Health Policy and Services Research, and Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD, director of the Penn Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics.
“One of the major challenges of delivering mental health services effectively and efficiently is to get those who are seeking such services into evidence-based treatment in the community settings where most care is provided,” Volpp said in a press release. “This funding will help us to do that and we are very grateful to the NIMH for its support. This is especially important because studies show that many forms of treatment with good records of success in clinical trials and practices are seldom implemented successfully in community settings.”
The center will offer a “methods core” that provides information on behavioral economics and implementation science, participatory design, and statistical applications for designing studies and treatments and measuring efficacy.
An administrative core will provide oversight and encourage communication about best practices and collaboration between researchers and clinicians participating in activities at the center.
The Penn ALACRITY center will launch three projects to improve treatment for individuals receiving services through publicly-funded grant processes.
The first project will be led by Volpp, Steve Marcus, PhD, and Mark Olfson, PhD, to compare methods for increasing antidepressant adherence during the first 6 weeks of treatment among adults newly diagnosed with depression. According to the release, only one-fourth of patients with newly diagnosed depression take their prescribed medication for 12 weeks. Researchers will assess efficacy of two forms of financial incentives and use of daily feedback on medication adherence to determine ways to improve adherence.
The second project, led by Mandell and Melanie Pellecchia, PhD, will assess efficacy of nonfinancial incentives, including positive feedback and associating performance with professional status, to improve use of evidence-based practices among individual aides who work with school-age children with autism.
More than half of the cohort will have an individual aide.
The third project, led by Beidas and Nate Williams, PhD, draws on research from the Philadelphia Mental Health System over the past 5 years that indicated therapists feel underrecognized and underrewarded for using evidence-based practices.
Researchers will use innovation tournaments to receive clinician feedback on how organizations can use financial and nonfinancial incentives to encourage therapists to use evidence-based practices.
Clinicians with winning ideas will partner with behavior economists to further develop their ideas, which will be compared in future trials.
The ALACRITY center will offer training opportunities for other Penn researchers to use behavioral economics and implementation science to improve mental health service delivery. Pilot funding will be available annually.
Further, ALACRITY center staff will develop new statistical methods and study-designs for increasing quality of mental health care and improves outcomes by using evidence-based treatments.
“We have decades worth of evidence regarding the best ways to treat people with psychiatric disorders, yet we find over and over again that care delivered in to most people with psychiatric disorders is not consistent with that evidence,” Mandell said in the release. “Our center is designed to develop and rigorously test innovative, practical strategies to increase the use of evidence-based care. We’ve brought together internationally-renowned researchers from different disciplines to conduct work that will transform the way we think about the care system for people with these often-disabling disorders.”