A Patient-Centered Decision-Support Tool Informed by History of Interpersonal Violence: "Will This Treatment Work for...

The Probability of Treatment Benefit (PTB) chart is a decision-support tool that quantifies, in absolute terms, the probability that an individual patient will benefit from a psychological treatment based on the individual's pre-treatment characteristics. The demand for such a tool has increased with the growing emphasis on personalized medicine and the need for selecting a treatment from an expanding list of evidence-based models. This method has the potential to provide clinicians and mental health consumers with a practical and interpretable means of comparing treatment options for individuals whose benefit from a particular treatment may differ substantially. We provide a practice update and demonstrate how to develop a PTB chart using data from a randomized controlled trial examining the efficacy of two approaches for treating posttraumatic stress disorder based on patients' pre-treatment exposure to multiple types of interpersonal violence. Step-by-step instructions for applying the PTB method are provided.