The Clinical Effectiveness Institute
What does effective clinical practice require?
The Clinical Effectiveness Institute examines the conditions that support effective clinical practice. Through clinical scholarship, professional education, organizational consultation, workforce development, and quality improvement, CEI works with clinicians, supervisors, provider organizations, and behavioral-health systems to strengthen the quality and effectiveness of clinical care.
Enter the Clinical Decision Lab
A client reports anxiety. What would you ask next? Work through ten decisions and see how each choice changes what you can understand.
Enter the lab
The Clinical Effectiveness Institute begins before modality. Its work is grounded in the foundational clinical skills and forms of thinking that make responsible psychotherapy possible, whether or not the clinician organizes the work through a therapeutic approach: assessing the client’s capacity for psychological work, recognizing and using clinical information across verbal, somatic, and relational channels, making the alliance explicit, and developing and revising a formulation that identifies what the psychological work requires. These clinical disciplines precede and extend across modalities. They do not tell clinicians which model to practice. They allow clinicians to understand what is happening, what kind of work is possible, what must become possible for change to occur, and whether the clinical work is moving in the right direction. This is where clinical effectiveness begins, and it is where the work of the Institute starts.
The Clinical Effectiveness Institute advances a school of clinical thought centered on the development of expert psychological thinkers. It begins before modality, with the foundational clinical disciplines that allow clinicians to determine what is happening, what kind of psychological work is possible, what change requires, and whether the clinical work is on the right track. CEI is not a therapeutic model or an orientation to which clinicians must adhere. It is an approach to clinician development that strengthens the psychological thinking on which responsible psychotherapy depends.
Behavioral-health systems have become increasingly sophisticated at organizing, documenting, funding, and measuring care. Clinicians have access to more modalities, protocols, techniques, and continuing education than ever before. A more basic question remains insufficiently developed: how do we know whether the clinical work itself is good?
CEI focuses on that question. Its work examines the reasoning, judgment, supervision, organizational structures, and quality-improvement practices required for treatment to become more than service delivery. CEI exists to strengthen the clinical capacities and systems required to make that expectation more answerable.