Remote Supervision for Implementing Collaborative Care for Perinatal Depression

Depression is a common and serious disorder among pregnant women but few from low income groups receive effective treatment. The highly evidence based collaborative care (CC) model for depression has been shown to work for women in pregnancy but has not been widely implemented in this population. The proposed study targets improving dissemination of the evidence based CC treatment model for pregnant and postpartum women with depression, a common disorder of the perinatal period (pregnancy and the first year following birth). Longitudinal remote consultation (LRC) is an implementation strategy that has been have shown to improve fidelity to evidence-based practices and patient outcomes for mental health innovations. The investigators believe LRC can be used with equal benefit for complex interventions such as CC.

The purpose of this study is to compare two implementation strategies for Collaborative Care depression treatment: 1) standard implementation and 2) standard implementation + Longitudinal Remote Consultation (LRC). This research is being done in order to assess implementation and patient outcomes in sites receiving a standard implementation approach with and without LRC. The results of the proposed study will provide information on the benefits and relative value of ongoing consultation, such as LRC, for implementation of complex interventions like collaborative care.

The proposed study will involve twenty health centers providing prenatal care which are part of the national OCHIN Network or other health center network. All sites will receive a standard implementation approach. After pre-implementation training ten of the sites will be randomly selected to receive LRC. Implementation and clinical outcomes as well as costs will be compared between the study conditions after a 12 month implementation period and a 13-21 month sustainment period. The results of the proposed study will provide critical generalizable knowledge regarding the benefits of ongoing consultation for implementation of complex interventions like collaborative care.