Five-Year Impact of Quality Improvement for Depression Results of a Group-Level Randomized Controlled Trial

depressed primary care patients can improve health out-comes for 6 to 28 months; effects for longer than 28 months are unknown. Objective:To assess how QI for depression affects health outcomes, quality of care, and health outcome dispari-ties at 57-month follow-up. Design: A group-level randomized controlled trial. Setting: Forty-six primary care practices in 6 managed care organizations. Patients: Of 1356 primary care patients who screened positive for depression and enrolled in the trial, 991 (73%, including 451 Latinos and African Americans) com-pleted 57-month telephone follow-up. Interventions:Clinics were randomly assigned to usual care or to 1 of 2 QI programs supporting QI teams, pro-vider training, nurse assessment, and patient education, plus resources to support medication management (QI-meds) or psychotherapy (QI-therapy) for 6 to 12 months. Main Outcome Measures: Probable depressive dis-order in the previous 6 months, mental health–related quality of life in the previous 30 days, primary care or mental health specialty visits, counseling or antidepres-sant medications in the previous 6 months, and unmet need, defined as depressed but not receiving appropri-ate care. Results:Combined QI-meds and QI-therapy, relative to usual care, reduced the percentage of participants with probable disorder at 5 years by 6.6 percentage points (P=.04). QI-therapy improved health outcomes and re-duced unmet need for appropriate care among Latinos and African Americans combined but provided few long-term benefits among whites, reducing outcome dispari-ties related to usual care (P=.04 for QI-ethnicity inter-action for probable depressive disorder). Conclusions:Programs for QI for depressed primary care patients implemented by managed care practices can im-prove health outcomes 5 years after implementation and reduce health outcome disparities by markedly improv-ing health outcomes and unmet need for appropriate care among Latinos and African Americans relative to whites; thus, equity was improved in the long run