M04 – How Clinicians Can Design Program Evaluations of Group Interventions (Telehealth & In person) in Integrated Care

Summary

Clinicians and administrators are often interested in implementing new interventions in integrated care settings to increase access to effective treatments but may lack training or experience in program evaluation (PE). This presentation will teach clinicians how to design program evaluations for group interventions. To illustrate this process, we will describe a PE we conducted of a primary care mental health group intervention: the Managing Stress and Emotions Group (MSEG), a brief five session group adaptation of the Unified Protocol, a transdiagnostic mental health treatment (De Paul & Caver, 2020). We conducted a PE to examine its impact on anxiety and depression among a racially and ethnically diverse Veteran patient population. We are now offering MSEG completely via telehealth to increase safe access to treatment during the pandemic, which has introduced some challenges for collecting outcome data . After briefly describing our PE (10 minutes), the presenters will teach how to design a program evaluation through identifying the problem and outcomes to measure, selecting the group/class intervention, selecting and administering measures, how to analyze the data, and special considerations for the unique challenges associated with PE for telehealth groups/classes (20 minutes). We will facilitate hands-on small group exercises via virtual break-out groups for participants to practice designing a PE using worksheets we will provide (15 minutes) and then provide an opportunity for the small groups to share their PE plans, receive feedback from presenters, and engage in large group discussion and Q&A (15 minutes). This presentation addresses the conference theme of telehealth and teaches clinicians helpful skills for evaluating interventions being delivered in their clinics, which will help to equip CFHA members to contribute to the empirical evidence base for integrated care.