Local Participatory Systems Dynamics to Increase Reach of Evidence Based Addiction and Mental Health Care

The most common reasons Veterans seek VA addiction and mental health care is for help with opioid and alcohol misuse, depression and PTSD. Research evidence has established highly effective treatments that prevent relapse, overdose and suicide, but even with policy mandates, performance metrics, and electronic health records to fix the problem, these treatments may only reach 3-28% of patients. This study tests participatory business engineering methods (Participatory System Dynamics) that engage patients, providers and policy makers against the status quo approaches, such as data review, and will determine if participatory system dynamics works, why it works, and whether it can be applied in many health care settings to guarantee patient access to the highest quality care and better meet the addiction and mental health needs of Veterans and the U.S. population.

NCT Number	NCT04356274
Lead Sponsor	Palo Alto Veterans Institute for Research
Conditions	PTSD, Depression, Alcohol Use Disorder, Opioid Use Disorder
Enrollment	720 participants
Start Date	2019-02-01
Primary Completion	2026-07-31 (estimated)
Study Completion	2027-01-29 (estimated)
Updated on ClinicalTrials.gov	2026-05-04