Psychotherapy is undergoing a veritable revolution. And if you're not paying attention, you could miss opportunities to change attitudes, spend less and save lives. 

Michael Gavin

For nearly a century, the field of psychotherapy (which includes cognitive behavioral therapy and other modalities common in the treatment of chronic pain) has been deemed a subjective and ethereal art based on human relationships, perception of progress and patient self-reported outcomes. Therapists argued such things couldn't be measured, objectified or codified.

This feels intuitive to most of us — how can the assessment and treatment of behaviors, thoughts, emotions and reactions be reduced to mere data points, bar graphs or pie charts?  Contemporary medical evidence appears to suggest these modalities are efficacious, and that's sufficient for most of us to accept the status quo in the field.

The latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly contains an article by Tony Rousmaniere, What Your Therapist Doesn't Know. Recognize that last name? Only after reading the article and penning the first draft of this post did it occur to me to reach out to the estimable Peter Rousmaniere to ask if Tony were any relation. In fact, Tony is Peter's oldest son. I should have guessed. 

In the article, we learn about feedback-informed treatment (or FIT). In a space where 25% of patients drop out of therapy (likely higher among chronic pain cases, but that's just a guess on my part) and 5% to 10% of patients actually get worse during the course of treatment, wouldn't it be nice to be able to quantify, and perhaps even predict, patient progress?  

Turns out, more than 50 different (and, I suppose to some extent, competing) feedback systems have been developed over the past 20 years. Most involve detailed questionnaires administered to patients and designed not only to measure progress, but also to help therapists identify blind spots (like when a patient might be offering less than truthful feedback directly to the therapist, or about to drop out of treatment, or getting worse). One such feedback system was able to predict — with 85% accuracy and after only three sessions of therapy — which patients would deteriorate.  

New medical technologies, practice techniques and methodologies can take a long time to be adopted into everyday clinical application. Rousmaniere discusses the history of the thermometer: At one point, taking a patient's temperature and using that data as a tool in diagnosis was considered heretical and potentially dangerous to the practice of medicine (in that it might make doctors lazy and dull their skills as diagnosticians).

The time has clearly come for injecting data, metrics and objective performance feedback into psychotherapy. And since payers are hearing the constant drum beat of "psychosocial ... mental health ... CBT...", the thought occurs to me that the least we can do, if we're going to pay for this apparently efficacious intervention, is demand feedback-informed treatment for injured workers. We would demand no less in virtually every other area of medicine. 

Why settle here?

Michael Gavin is president of Prium, a medical managed care provider for the workers' compensation industry. This column was reprinted with permission from the firm's Evidence Based blog.