Consultation as an Implementation Strategy to Increase Fidelity of Measurement-Based Care Delivery in Community Mental Health Settings: An Observational Study

Regularly administering outcome measures to clients to inform clinical decision making, referred to as measurement-based care (MBC), has the potential to improve mental health treatment due to its applicability across disorders and treatment settings. Given the utility of MBC, understanding predictors of high-fidelity MBC implementation is important. Training and consultation are widely used implementation strategies to increase the fidelity of evidence-based practice delivery but have rarely been studied with MBC. The current study will examine the relationship between time clinicians spent discussing a case in consultation (“dosage”) and MBC fidelity. Thirty clinicians and 56 youth were in the MBC condition of a randomized controlled trial and completed baseline questionnaires. Consultation dosage was extracted from call notes. MBC fidelity was measured using the implementation index, which combines rates of administering and viewing questionnaires, using objective data from the online MBC system. Multi-level modeling was used. Greater consultation dosage significantly predicted a higher implementation index (ß = 0.27, SE = 0.06, p < .001). For every 30 min spent discussing a case in consultation, the case’s MBC fidelity increased by 8.1