Linking outcomes analysis to critical clinical pathways.

Expert decision-support soft-ware systems, when integrated with outcomes analyses, provide the opportunity to develop behavioral healthcare delivery systems in which providers are equipped to act decisively in a socially responsible manner. Key benefits of such systems include: enhancing the consistency and quality of clinical decision making across providers with varying professional backgrounds; providing a mechanism to ensure the rapid dissemination and implementation of new clinical research findings; performing severity-adjusted profiling of providers and programs based on the outcomes their services produce; and linking the prospective focus of clinical pathways with the retrospective rigor of outcomes analysis to accelerate advances in behavioral health. Integrating expert systems with outcomes analyses has the potential to rectify the historical failure by the behavioral healthcare professions to systematically link patient assessment data and their analysis to actual clinical decision making. Such systems will help make behavioral healthcare practice more accountable, thereby strengthening the argument for psychiatric patients to gain parity in healthcare benefits.