Colloquium: Innovative Methods for Facilitating and Understanding Feedback Use in Clinical Practice

ABSTRACT: This talk will consist of two smaller presentations. The first will focus on the application of technology within clinical practice to monitor and improve patient outcomes (which is the topic of presentation at the C9-G08 Forum for Graduate Perspectives on Sustainable Health Futures in Shanghai). The field of psychiatry and psychotherapy has lagged behind other areas of medical practice because of an absence of formal monitoring systems to evaluate treatment progress. Implementing such a system is vital as evidence-based treatments are not 100% effective, and 5-10% of patients deteriorate despite receiving treatment. Numerous studies now show that monitoring and feedback systems improve patient outcomes and reduce rates of deterioration, yet the uptake into clinical practice has been slow. Under the theme of “Sustainable Health Futures”, I will describe how technology has been used to facilitate implementation of a monitoring and feedback system at Perth Clinic, along with the challenges and benefits of this initiative. In the second half of the talk, I plan to discuss the use of a novel computer task in examining the factors that influence feedback use. This experimental analogue provides a creative, alternative method of generating more clues to the question of how we can promote feedback use in clinical practice.