New App Shows What's Working in Psychotherapy

Research evidence has shown clearly that therapists are more effective when they use standard measures to track patient progress in therapy. This approach is called Measurement Based Care (MBC).

Despite encouragement from professional organizations, adoption of Measurement Based Care has been limited. Implementing MBC in clinical settings can be burdensome if not efficiently implemented by an electronic health record (EHR) platform. Standalone commercially available MBC systems are costly and often difficult to implement and sustain over time.

MakingTherapyBetter aims to break the bottleneck by putting a free app in the hands of the patient, letting the patient track their progress and share the information with their therapists.

Here’s how it works: The MakingTherapyBetter app prompts the patient to complete weekly brief measures of symptoms (depression and anxiety), well-being, loneliness, confidence in their therapist and confidence in their treatment. Patients taking medication are also asked about adherence and side-effects. Completing the assessments takes only a few minutes per week and patients can easily share the results with their therapists. The report can be downloaded and added to any clinical record.

Bruce Wampold, PHD, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and internationally recognized psychotherapy effectiveness researcher, designed the assessment protocol and will be monitoring the benefits of the app as part of the MakingTherapyBetter project (MakingTherapyBetter.com).

The MakingTherapyBetter tool has been available in Carepaths EHR since 2023. Any clinic, therapist or organization can put a link to the making therapy better app (makingtherapybetter.com) on their website.

We believe the power of therapy lies in the relationship between the patient and the therapist. We offer MakingTherapyBetter to support that relationship.

MakingTherapyBetter is a DBA of CarePaths, Inc. CarePaths offers an ONC certified EHR for mental health treatment providers and includes other tools to support clinicians. MakingTherapyBetter is a project that aims to improve behavioral services through educational podcasts and free tools for patients.

Bruce Wampold, PHD: “We’ve seen Measurement Based Care work in clinical trials over the years. Now, it’s time to make it widely available to all patients and therapists.”