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Published in: Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research 4/2013

01-07-2013 | Original Article

Measuring Use of Evidence Based Psychotherapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Authors: Brian Shiner, Leonard W. D’Avolio, Thien M. Nguyen, Maha H. Zayed, Yinong Young-Xu, Rani A. Desai, Paula P. Schnurr, Louis D. Fiore, Bradley V. Watts

Published in: Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research | Issue 4/2013

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Abstract

To improve methods of estimating use of evidence-based psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder in the Veteran’s health administration, we evaluated administrative data and note text for patients newly enrolling in six VHA outpatient PTSD clinics in New England during the 2010 fiscal year (n = 1,924). Using natural language processing, we developed machine learning algorithms that mimic human raters in classifying note text. We met our targets for algorithm performance as measured by precision, recall, and F-measure. We found that 6.3 % of our study population received at least one session of evidence-based psychotherapy during the initial 6 months of treatment. Evidence-based psychotherapies appear to be infrequently utilized in VHA outpatient PTSD clinics in New England. Our method could support efforts to improve use of these treatments.
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Metadata
Title
Measuring Use of Evidence Based Psychotherapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
Authors
Brian Shiner
Leonard W. D’Avolio
Thien M. Nguyen
Maha H. Zayed
Yinong Young-Xu
Rani A. Desai
Paula P. Schnurr
Louis D. Fiore
Bradley V. Watts
Publication date
01-07-2013
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research / Issue 4/2013
Print ISSN: 0894-587X
Electronic ISSN: 1573-3289
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-012-0421-0

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