Schizophrenia PORT Treatment Recommendations Update 2008

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Significant resources have been expended in the development of treatment recommendations and other types of evidence-based clinical guidelines for a variety of health conditions, including schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses. Technologies for treating persons with schizophrenia, including new medications and psychosocial treatments, are rapidly evolving. To keep pace with new research findings, treatment recommendations must be regularly updated to ensure that efforts to improve quality of care reflect current empirical knowledge. The Schizophrenia Patient Outcomes Research Team (PORT) Treatment Recommendations were initially published in 1998 and subsequently updated in 2003. This R13 grant application requests two years of funding to organize and direct a conference in 2008 to develop expert consensus on the evidence base to update and expand the Schizophrenia PORT Treatment Recommendations. This grant will enable the development of an infrastructure to review new research findings published since 2002 on the efficacy and effectiveness of treatments for schizophrenia that will be discussed at the conference. This infrastructure will include the development of an internet-based tool for summarizing data abstracted from research reports, displaying drafts of the treatment recommendations, obtaining and summarizing experts' ratings of and comments on the draft recommendations, and displaying the final version of the recommendations for the general public after the conference. Key participants in the 2008 PORT update conference will include faculty from the University of Maryland Department of Psychiatry who will be responsible for reviewing the new evidence on psychopharmacologic and psychosocial treatments for schizophrenia. The faculty will be guided by an Advisory Board of scientific experts and relevant stakeholders, who will also participate as part of a larger Expert Panel. The Expert Panel will provide ratings and comments on the draft recommendations and will convene at the 2008 conference to reach consensus on the interpretation of the evidence base and the final wording of the recommendations. This project addresses an explicit area of emphasis of the Services Research and Clinical Epidemiology Branch within the NIMH Division of Services and Interventions Research, which is to develop a sound knowledge base to substantially increase the sustainable uptake of scientifically based treatments and services for mental disorders. The prevalence, severity and costs of schizophrenia combine to make this psychiatric illness a major public health concern. The Schizophrenia Patient Outcomes Research Team (PORT) Treatment Recommendations were developed to help ensure that individuals with schizophrenia receive the highest quality treatments supported by current empirical knowledge. This R13 conference grant will support efforts to update the Schizophrenia PORT Treatment Recommendations in order to keep pace with new research findings on appropriate and effective treatments for schizophrenia.