Individual risk of not responding to psychotherapy in Latin America: Bringing data-informed precision care to underresourced clinical settings.

OBJECTIVE

Machine learning has a great potential for prospectively forecasting individual patient response to mental health care (MHC), thereby enabling treatment personalization. However, previous efforts have been limited to populations living in predominantly higher income, developed countries. This study aimed to extend the reach of precision MHC systems by developing and testing a feasible and readily implementable algorithm for identifying patients at risk of nonresponse to routinely delivered psychotherapy in Chile, a developing country in Latin America.

METHOD

Data were derived from a community-based, randomized trial that tested the effects of progress feedback on naturalistically delivered psychotherapy outcome. Patients were 547 adults who were consecutively admitted to an outpatient clinic in Santiago, Chile. Treatment response was defined using norms for reliable improvement on the Outcome Questionnaire-30. Based on 10 sociodemographic and seven clinical predictors, we trained elastic net and random forest algorithms on a randomly selected training set (70%; n = 384). The best performing algorithm was tested on a hold-out sample (30%; n = 163).

RESULTS

Reliable improvement was achieved in 42% of the cases. A random forest algorithm demonstrated moderate performance in the hold-out sample (area under the curve = .74, Brier score = .21), correctly identifying 73% of the patients who did not respond.

CONCLUSION

This study developed a predictive algorithm that demonstrated moderate accuracy in identifying patients at risk of nonresponse to naturalistic psychotherapy in Chile, using routinely assessed and easy-to-collect sociodemographic and clinical information. Using such tools may represent one step toward reducing the multilayered outcome disparities faced by individuals receiving MHC in socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).