Developing an outcomes management strategy for the treatment of depression

From a variety of perspectives and for numerous reasons, the U.S. medical care system is in crisis. Most of the efforts in recent years to improve quality and control costs have met with only modest, if any success. Recently, Ellwood outlined a new approach to making decisions in the medical care system which has the potential of addressing the problems with the system. This approach, called Outcomes Management, seeks to systematically assess the patient's outcome from a health status perspective as well as using traditional methods. These health status measures are both generic and disease-specific. This paper describes the approach to and general outline of a disease-specific measure for depression. The measure assesses patients at baseline and at periodic outcome points as well as collecting information about the treatment that the patient receives.