The U.S. Army’s efforts to come to grips with a dramatic upsurge in war-related behavioral conditions over the past 13 years holds valuable lessons for bringing precision mental health care to the civilian world.
Virtually everyone realizes that precision medicine, which aims to tailor care to the individual patient’s needs, is essential. Yet in attempts to bring patient-centered, outcomes-based approaches to health care in recent years, mental health has taken a back seat to other areas of medical care. Almost alone among industrialized nations, the United States does not systematically collect data on mental health care outcomes and lacks any nationwide means for harnessing it. Further, the broad range of difficult conditions, competing therapies, and different professions within mental health care have made it seem a poor candidate for the precise assessment, ongoing monitoring, and individualized feedback that are necessary components for making precision medicine a reality.
[For more of this story, written by Jayakanth Srinivasan, Millard D. Brown, Christopher G. Ivany, and Jonathan Woodson, go to https://hbr.org/2016/12/how-th...s-mental-health-care]
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