MedTrace Logo

Participatory System Dynamics vs Usual Quality Improvement: Staff Use of Simulation as an Effective, Scalable and Affordable Way to Improve Timely Mental Health Care?

NCT04208217 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 720

Last updated 2026-05-11

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Evidence-based VA care is best for meeting Veterans' mental health needs, such as depression, PTSD and opioid use disorder, to prevent suicide or overdose. But some key evidence-based practices only reach 3-28% of patients. Participatory system dynamics (PSD) helps improve quality with existing resources, critical in mental health and all VA health care. PSD uses learning simulations to improve staff decisions, showing how goals for quality can best be achieved given local resources and constraints. This study aims to significantly increase the proportion of patients who start and complete evidence-based care, and determine the costs of using PSD for improvement. Empowering frontline staff with PSD simulation encourages safe 'virtual' prototyping of complex changes to scheduling, referrals and staffing, before translating changes to the 'real world.' This study determines if PSD increases Veteran access to the highest quality care, and if PSD better maximizes VA resources when compared against usual trial-and-error approaches to improving quality.

Conditions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Modeling to Learn (MTL)

Modeling to Learn is a facilitated health care quality improvement or evidence-based practice implementation strategy that includes frontline addiction and mental health staff running simulations of clinic improvement strategies to find the best approaches for improving the reach of evidence-based psychotherapy and evidence-based pharmacotherapy.

BEHAVIORAL

Usual quality improvement (QI)

Usual quality improvement is a health care quality improvement or evidence-based practice implementation strategy that includes frontline addiction and mental health staff reviewing data to find the best approaches for improving the reach of evidence-based psychotherapy and evidence-based pharmacotherapy.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • VA Office of Research and Development

    lead FED

Principal Investigators

  • Lindsey E. Zimmerman, PhD · VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH
Masking
NONE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2021-07-22
Primary Completion
2026-01-31
Completion
2026-01-31

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT04208217 on ClinicalTrials.gov