Clinical trial NCT01013220: Depression Management at the Workplace
Official title: Influencing Employer Purchasing Behavior
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Depression
Keywords: depression
depression care management
financing
absenteeism
presenteeism
employer decisions to purchase health care benefits
Lead sponsor: Florida State University
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: Colorado Business Group on Health
name: University of South Florida
First posted: 2009-11-13
Enrollment: 293
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Brief summary: Randomized trials demonstrate that depression management products can improve clinical and organizational outcomes sufficiently for selected employers to realize a return on investment. Rather than usual care marketing which uses voltage-enhanced promises to sell voltage-diminished products, the investigators designed an evidence-based (EB) intervention to encourage employers to purchase a depression management product that offers the type, intensity and duration of care shown to provide clinical and organizational value. In an RCT designed to examine employer benefit purchasing behavior of depression products in 360 employer members of over 20 regional business coalitions, the research team proposes: (a) to compare the impact of evidence-based (EB) to usual care (UC) presentations on employer benefit purchasing behavior, and (b) to identify mediators and organizational moderators of intervention impact on employer benefit purchasing behavior.

This study addresses what policy analysts argue is one of the most pivotal problems in the translation of evidence-based care to 'real world' settings: whether purchasers can be influenced to buy health care products on the basis of value rather than cost. In the likely event that EB \> UC, the study will provide encouragement to use an evidence-based approach to market new health care products to private payers on the basis of the product's clinical and organizational value. UC may achieve comparable outcomes to EB if the limiting factors in benefit purchasing are organizational, purchasing group and vendor constraints that no intervention can meaningfully modify. Support for this scenario would encourage the targeted marketing of new products to coalition members with empirically identified organizational, purchasing group and vendor characteristics, using usual care strategies.


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Coalitions who belong to the National Business Coalition on Health are eligible if:

  * they have 30+ employer purchasers/affiliates as members
  * they act as more than purchasing agents
  * (3)they did not participate in the research team's preliminary studies on this topic.
* Employers of participating coalitions are eligible if:

  * they are a public or private organization providing health care benefits to 100+ domestic employees
  * they have not purchased a depression management product in the past two years.

Exclusion Criteria:

* None

Primary outcomes:
measure: employer purchase of depression management product
timeFrame: two years after intervention
Secondary outcomes:
measure: fidelity of depression management model purchased to evidence-based models
timeFrame: two years after intervention
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Denver
country: United States
facility: Colorado Business Group on Health
state: Colorado
Study officials:
affiliation: Florida State University, College of Medicine
name: Kathryn Rost, PhD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References:
citation: Rost KM, Meng H, Xu S. Work productivity loss from depression: evidence from an employer survey. BMC Health Serv Res. 2014 Dec 18;14:597. doi: 10.1186/s12913-014-0597-y.
citation: Rost KM, Marshall D, Xu S. Intervention impact on depression product appraisal and purchasing behavior by employers: a randomized trial. BMC Health Serv Res. 2014 Sep 24;14:426. doi: 10.1186/1472-6963-14-426.