This application is a application for a five-year NIMH Independent Scientist Career Development Award (K-02) to prepare the candidate to design an intervention to encourage employers to engage in efforts to assure their depressed employees receive high quality treatment for the condition. To accomplish this goal, the application presents a detailed research plan describing a scientifically rigorous process to select a performance indicator that predicts the work impairment costs employers absorb, and to evaluate how quality improvement initiatives impact the selected performance indicator and total employer costs. After validating the indicator in an independent database, the candidate will provide performance indicator feedback to large corporations created from their own claims databases. This pilot will assist the candidate in identifying additional components that need to be added to a performance indicator intervention to successfully engage employers in quality assurance activities. In order to succeed with this research agenda, the candidate proposes a specific learning plan to develop knowledge of advanced statistical skills needed to create performance indicators; cost effectiveness analysis skills needed to evaluate the effect of quality improvement interventions on total employer costs; and other important skill sets detailed in the application. During the final year of the award, the candidate proposes to pilot an intervention prototype and develop a proposal for a full intervention trial. In supplanting the salary the candidate draws for administrative and teaching duties, the Career Development Award will increase the applicants ability to better integrate mental health services research and employer decision-making. In addition, support from this award will allow the applicant to transfer existing and newly acquired skills to other investigators interested in testing new interventions for their effect on under-investigated work outcomes.
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