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Biomedical subjects

Kenneth I Howard

Publications and source records attributed to Kenneth I Howard.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

What random assignment does and does not do.

Random assignment of patients to comparison groups stochastically tends, with increasing sample size or number of experiment replications, to minimize the confounding of treatment outcome differences by the effects of differences among these groups in unknown/unmeasured patient characteristics. To what degree such confounding is actually avoided we cannot know unless we have validly measured these patient variables, but completely avoiding it is quite unlikely. Even if this confounding were completely avoided, confounding by unmeasured Patient Variable x Treatment Variable interactions remains a possibility. And the causal power of the confounding variables is no less important for internal validity than the degree of confounding.

Causality↗

Outcomes management, expected treatment response, and severity-adjusted provider profiling in outpatient psychotherapy.

To make use of psychotherapy research in practice, therapists need real-time access to valid clinically relevant information about patients. The dose-effect and phase models of psychotherapy provide a theoretical background for empirically based psychotherapy management by describing the systematic nature of progress in therapy and guiding the selection of outcome criteria. Given this theoretical background, it is possible to derive appropriate models for monitoring cases in ongoing therapies (patient profiling) and identifying therapists' relative strengths and weaknesses (severity-adjusted provider profiling). These applied methods may be used to inform decision making in ongoing psychotherapies and to support supervision and clinical training.

Humans↗

Some relationships among assessments of depression.

The Directions program provides an administratively efficient method to screen for psychological disorders in a primary-care setting (FOCUS), confirm the need for treatment, and monitor progress (COMPASS-PC). The instruments are psychometrically sound and grounded in an established theory of mental-health treatment. The present study reports the relationships between FOCUS, COMPASS-PC, and the Hamilton Depression scale for a sample of patients who have been diagnosed as major depressive disorder, dysthymia, or depressive syndrome by standardized criteria (i.e., SCID-IV and DSM-IV). Moreover, Focus and COMPASS-PC are evaluated for their ability to detect depression as defined by SCID-IV and DSM IV. Furthermore, we examine the relationship between the different instruments in their ability to measure response to treatment over time.

Adult↗