Beyond Efficacy and Effectiveness: Clinical Efficiency Is Necessary for Dissemination

Nearly all patients interact with critical gatekeepers-insurance companies or centralized healthcare systems. For mental health dissemination efforts to be successful, these gatekeepers must refer patients to evidence-based care. To make these referral decisions, they require evidence about the amount of resources expended to achieve therapeutic gains. Without this information, a bottleneck to widespread dissemination of evidence-based care will remain. To address this need for information, we introduce a new perspective, clinical efficiency. This approach directly ties resource usage to clinical outcomes. We highlight how cost-effectiveness approaches and other strategies can address clinical efficiency, and we also introduce a related new metric, the incremental time efficiency ratio (ITER). The ITER is particularly useful for quantifying the benefits of low-intensity and concentrated interventions, as well as stepped-care approaches. Given that stakeholders are increasingly requiring information on resource utilization, the ITER is a metric that can be estimated for past and future clinical trials. As a result, the ITER can allow researchers to better communicate desirable aspects of treatment, and an increased focus on clinical efficiency can improve our ability to deliver high-quality treatment to more patients in need.