[Assessment-Based Home Treatment for People with Severe Psychotic Disorders]

Although there is growing evidence for clinical effectiveness of crisis resolution teams (also called Home Treatment Teams) for patients with severe psychotic disorders, a lot of studies suffer from poor model fidelity, which leads to an ignorance of specific effective factors.

Here we present the implementation of an assessment-based Home Treatment in Germany. Assessment-derived therapeutic tasks are shared between team members by a manualized process.

We visited 32 patients almost 600 times in 15 months. The median was 15.5 visits per patient. Adherence to Home Treatment intervention was significantly stronger (unplanned discharge 16 %) compared to prior hospitalization (unplanned discharge 50 %) (Chi-square test, p = 0.003).

Applying this model, a detailed definition of specific tasks for team members leads to a high model fidelity and increases patients' compliance to therapy.