Depression Management at the Workplace (DMW)

Florida State University

Status: Completed

Conditions: Depression

Treatments: Other: Depression Product Detailing; Other: Depression HEDIS detailing

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01013220

R01MH076227

Details and patient eligibility

About

Randomized trials demonstrate that depression management products can improve clinical and organizational outcomes sufficiently for selected employers to realize a return on investment. Rather than usual care marketing which uses voltage-enhanced promises to sell voltage-diminished products, the investigators designed an evidence-based (EB) intervention to encourage employers to purchase a depression management product that offers the type, intensity and duration of care shown to provide clinical and organizational value. In an RCT designed to examine employer benefit purchasing behavior of depression products in 360 employer members of over 20 regional business coalitions, the research team proposes: (a) to compare the impact of evidence-based (EB) to usual care (UC) presentations on employer benefit purchasing behavior, and (b) to identify mediators and organizational moderators of intervention impact on employer benefit purchasing behavior.

This study addresses what policy analysts argue is one of the most pivotal problems in the translation of evidence-based care to 'real world' settings: whether purchasers can be influenced to buy health care products on the basis of value rather than cost. In the likely event that EB > UC, the study will provide encouragement to use an evidence-based approach to market new health care products to private payers on the basis of the product's clinical and organizational value. UC may achieve comparable outcomes to EB if the limiting factors in benefit purchasing are organizational, purchasing group and vendor constraints that no intervention can meaningfully modify. Support for this scenario would encourage the targeted marketing of new products to coalition members with empirically identified organizational, purchasing group and vendor characteristics, using usual care strategies.

Enrollment: 293 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Coalitions who belong to the National Business Coalition on Health are eligible if:

  • they have 30+ employer purchasers/affiliates as members
  • they act as more than purchasing agents
  • (3)they did not participate in the research team's preliminary studies on this topic.

• Employers of participating coalitions are eligible if:

  • they are a public or private organization providing health care benefits to 100+ domestic employees
  • they have not purchased a depression management product in the past two years.

Exclusion criteria

• None

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

---

293 participants in 2 patient groups, including a placebo group

Depression Product Detailing

Experimental group

Description:

Employers receive education on how to purchase high quality depression management products to improve the quality of depression treatment depressed employees receive. Materials delivered in this arm of the study are available at www.caremanagementfordepression.org

Treatment:

Other: Depression Product Detailing

Depression HEDIS Detailing

Placebo Comparator group

Description:

Employers receive education on how to obtain and use HEDIS depression indicators to encourage health plans to improve the quality of depression treatment depressed employees receive

Treatment:

Other: Depression HEDIS detailing