The Effects of Primary Care Depression Treatment on Patients' Clinical Status and Employment

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effects of depression treatment in primary care on patients' clinical status and employment, over six months. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING: Data are from a randomized controlled trial of quality improvement for depression that included 938 adults with depressive disorder in 46 managed primary care clinics in five states. STUDY DESIGN: Observational analysis of the effects of evidence-based depression care over six months on health outcomes and employment. Selection into treatment is accounted for using instrumental variables techniques, with randomized assignment to the quality improvement intervention as the identifying instrument. DATA COLLECTION/EXTRACTION METHODS: Patient-reported clinical status, employment, health care use, and personal characteristics; health care use and costs from claims data. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: At six months, patients with appropriate care, compared to those without it, had lower rates of depressive disorder (24 percent versus 70 percent), better mental health-related quality of life, and higher rates of employment (72 percent versus 53 percent), each p<.05. CONCLUSIONS: Appropriate treatment for depression provided in community-based primary care substantially improves clinical and quality of life outcomes and employment

The Health Value and Cost of Care for Major Depression

AbstractBackgroundTrade-offs between costs and outcomes are a reality of health-care decisions. Cost-effectiveness analyses can guide choices toward interventions with the most health benefit for the least cost but are limited because generic measures of health value are infrequently available in the literature and are expensive to collect.ObjectiveWe report on the application of a new approach to estimate the health value of alternative treatment patterns. We apply this approach to common treatment patterns for major depression, and we generate estimates of the change in health value that is attributable to a particular treatment. We also obtain estimates of treatment costs and report cost/health value ratios. We used a modified expert panel approach to estimate the change in health value attributable to different patterns of treatment. We used claims and pharmacy data to define usual care treatment patterns and estimate costs.ResultsThe lowest cost and most frequent treatment, 1 to 3 psychotherapy visits, produces minimal improvement. Treatments that include an antidepressant medication provide more health benefit per unit cost than all other treatments and adding a medication follow-up visit provides a lot of benefit for minimal cost.ConclusionsWe demonstrate the application of a new approach to estimate the health value of common depression treatment practices in the United States. Our results suggest cost-effective targets for quality improvement efforts by identifying ways in which treatment for depression could cost less to get to a given outcome. Because our approach uses a generic health outcome measure, it can be applied to other conditions, permitting comparisons of benefit across diseases