Express Access is the first scientific referral process in health care that helps patients find the right behavioral health support based on their unique needs.
Behavioral health providers promote their specialties and skills on websites all over the internet. The correlation between these self-perceived strengths and actual patient outcomes is near zero (Constantino et al, 2023). Outcome Referrals has spent the past four decades solving this problem.
NIH has funded the development of Express Access, and the science was tested in a PCORI-funded double-blind randomized clinical trial with JAMA-published results. The innovation (called TOP Match TM) assisted five times more patients to return to full health without relapse compared to the control group matched to care based on a provider’s self-proclaimed strengths.
In the TOP Match condition, patient issues were identified with the Treatment Outcome Package© (TOP) – a revolutionary full-panel diagnostic screening tool that was developed by factor analyzing nearly all diagnostic symptoms on millions of patients across all levels of care. TOP is far more accurate than the PHQ-9 in measuring depression and also measures 10-15 additional measures of wellbeing (e.g., quality of life, anxiety, psychosis, substance abuse, sleep, mania, work functioning, sexual functioning, suicide, violence, life stress and many others). With this accurate analysis of each patient’s treatment needs, TOP Match provides each patient with a short list of treatment providers who have a recent track record of helping similar patients achieve statistically superior risk-adjusted outcomes when their patients’ outcomes are tracked with the same assessment. It’s precision medicine at its best.
