Bipolar Disorder Measures in Clinical Care

Study setting: Five primary care clinics with integrated psychiatric and psychological services.

Study population: Goal recruitment is 30 patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder currently receiving treatment in study sites. Patients will be identified through clinician referrals, chart review, and searching the Epic patient panel functionality of the IBH service.

Study design: This pilot randomized effectiveness trial will assess feasibility (whether the intervention can be practically used in a setting) and acceptability (view that the intervention is agreeable or satisfactory) of the research procedures (e.g., recruitment, enrollment, consent, inclusion/exclusion criteria, randomization, participation, data collection). The investigators will use block randomization at the patient level. Within the five clinics, blocks of 3 will be used to ensure equal numbers of intervention and control patients. This will allow for the 30 patients to be randomly assigned to the 2 arms of the study, with equal numbers within clinics.

The investigators propose an effectiveness trial design with broad inclusion criteria and limited exclusion criteria. The investigators will use intent to treat analyses. To avoid contamination, the research coordinator will administer the measures to patients in both trial arms (enhanced usual care, and MBC with preferred measure) at clinic visits. The intervention patients will receive measures for manic and depressive symptoms, and the control patients will receive a measure of depressive symptoms. Usual care will be enhanced by the research coordinator consistently administering the depressive symptom measure to control arm participants, which is not part of usual care.

Fidelity Measurement: Chart review will be used to assess fidelity in both arms based on whether the patient completed the measure, whether the clinician reviewed measure results, and whether the clinician compared current symptom severity to past symptom severity.