Depression treatment in Germany - using claims data to compare a collaborative mental health care program to the general practitioner program and usual care in terms of guideline adherence and need-oriented access to psychotherapy

TY - JOUR

T1 - Depression treatment in Germany - using claims data to compare a collaborative mental health care program to the general practitioner program and usual care in terms of guideline adherence and need-oriented access to psychotherapy

AU - Engels, Alexander

AU - König, Hans-Helmut

AU - Magaard, Julia Luise

AU - Härter, Martin

AU - Hawighorst-Knapstein, Sabine

AU - Chaudhuri, Ariane

AU - Brettschneider, Christian

PY - 2020/12/14

Y1 - 2020/12/14

N2 - BACKGROUND: Societies strive for fast-delivered, evidence-based and need-oriented depression treatment within budget constraints. To explore potential improvements, selective contracts can be implemented. Here, we evaluate if the German collaborative psychiatry-neurology-psychotherapy contract (PNP), which extends the gatekeeping-based general practitioner (GP) program, improved guideline adherence or need-oriented and timely access to psychotherapy compared to usual care (UC).METHODS: We conducted a retrospective observational cohort study based on health insurance claims data. After we identified patients with depression who were on sick leave due to a mental disorder in 2015, we applied entropy balancing to adjust for selection effects and employed chi-squared tests to compare guideline adherence of the received treatment between PNP, the GP program and UC. Subsequently, we applied an extended cox regression to assess need-orientation by comparing the relationship between accumulated sick leave days and waiting times for psychotherapy across health plans.RESULTS: N = 23,245 patients were included. Regarding guideline adherence, we found no significant differences for most severity subgroups; except that patients with a first moderate depressive episode received antidepressants or psychotherapy more often in UC. Regarding need-orientation, we observed that the effect of each additional month of sick leave on the likelihood of starting psychotherapy was increased by 6% in PNP compared to UC. Irrespective of the health plan, we found that within the first 12 months only between 24.3 and 39.7% (depending on depression severity) received at least 10 psychotherapy sessions or adequate pharmacotherapy.CONCLUSIONS: The PNP contract strengthens the relationship between sick leave days and the delay until the beginning of psychotherapy, which suggests improvements in terms of need-oriented access to care. However, we found no indication for increased guideline adherence and - independent of the health plan - a gap in sufficient utilization of adequate treatment options.

AB - BACKGROUND: Societies strive for fast-delivered, evidence-based and need-oriented depression treatment within budget constraints. To explore potential improvements, selective contracts can be implemented. Here, we evaluate if the German collaborative psychiatry-neurology-psychotherapy contract (PNP), which extends the gatekeeping-based general practitioner (GP) program, improved guideline adherence or need-oriented and timely access to psychotherapy compared to usual care (UC).METHODS: We conducted a retrospective observational cohort study based on health insurance claims data. After we identified patients with depression who were on sick leave due to a mental disorder in 2015, we applied entropy balancing to adjust for selection effects and employed chi-squared tests to compare guideline adherence of the received treatment between PNP, the GP program and UC. Subsequently, we applied an extended cox regression to assess need-orientation by comparing the relationship between accumulated sick leave days and waiting times for psychotherapy across health plans.RESULTS: N = 23,245 patients were included. Regarding guideline adherence, we found no significant differences for most severity subgroups; except that patients with a first moderate depressive episode received antidepressants or psychotherapy more often in UC. Regarding need-orientation, we observed that the effect of each additional month of sick leave on the likelihood of starting psychotherapy was increased by 6% in PNP compared to UC. Irrespective of the health plan, we found that within the first 12 months only between 24.3 and 39.7% (depending on depression severity) received at least 10 psychotherapy sessions or adequate pharmacotherapy.CONCLUSIONS: The PNP contract strengthens the relationship between sick leave days and the delay until the beginning of psychotherapy, which suggests improvements in terms of need-oriented access to care. However, we found no indication for increased guideline adherence and - independent of the health plan - a gap in sufficient utilization of adequate treatment options.

U2 - 10.1186/s12888-020-02995-1

DO - 10.1186/s12888-020-02995-1

M3 - SCORING: Journal article

C2 - 33317480

VL - 20

SP - 591

JO - BMC PSYCHIATRY

JF - BMC PSYCHIATRY

SN - 1471-244X

IS - 1

ER -