The current state of evidence appears to support the efficacy and effectiveness of feedback interventions in enhancing treatment outcome.

Many branches of medicine rely heavily on lab tests to monitor client treatment response and use this information to modify their treatment. By contrast, those who offer psychological interventions seldom rely on formal assessments (lab tests) to monitor their clients' response to treatment. Data are presented that demonstrate that clinicians rarely accurately predict who will not benefit from psychotherapy. This finding is contrasted with the use of a questionnaire (lab test data) and decision rules on the basis of a client's expected progress. Results have indicated that formal methods of monitoring were able to identify 100% of the patients whose condition had deteriorated at termination, and 85% by the time they had attended three treatment sessions. Practitioners are encouraged to consider formal methods of identifying the deteriorating client.

Empirically supported psychotherapies, treatment guidelines, best practices, and treatment manuals are methods proposed to enhance treatment outcomes in routine practice. Patient‐focused research systems provide a compatible and contrasting methodology. Such systems monitor and feed back information about a patient's progress during psychotherapy for the purpose of enhancing outcomes. A meta‐analytic review of three large‐scale studies is summarized and suggests that formally monitoring patient progress has a significant impact on clients who show a poor initial response to treatment. Implementation of this feedback system reduced deterioration by 4% to 8% and increased positive outcomes. Our interpretation of these results suggests that it may be time for clinicians routinely and formally to monitor patient treatment response.

Client-focused research systems have been developed to monitor and provide feedback information about clients' progress in psychotherapy as a method of enhancing outcome for those who are predicted to be treatment failures. In the current study, the authors examined whether feedback regarding client progress and the use of clinical support tools (CSTs) affected client outcome and number of sessions attended. Results showed that clients in the feedback plus CST group stayed in therapy longer and had superior outcomes. Nearly twice as many clients in the feedback plus CST group achieved clinically significant or reliable change, and fewer were classified as deteriorated by the time treatment ended.

Patient-focused research attempts to provide information that answers the question: Is this treatment benefiting this patient? Although several systems have been developed to monitor and provide feedback about a patient's response to psychotherapy, few if any have been tested empirically. The current study divided 609 patients into four groups (two experimental and two control) to determine if feedback regarding patient progress, when provided to a therapist, affected patient outcome and number of sessions attended. Results showed that feedback increased the duration of treatment and improved outcome relative to patients in the control condition who were predicted to be treatment failures. Twice as many patients in the feedback group achieved clinically significant or reliable change and one-third as many were classified as deteriorated by the time treatment ended. For those patients who were predicted to have a positive response to treatment, feedback to therapists resulted in a reduction in the number of treatment sessions without reducing positive outcomes.