Collaborative research

Researchers around the country, from 1999 - 2004, conducted The IMPACT trial in close collaboration with one another. Since completion of the original trial, we have worked closely with researchers in the United States and Canada developing new research to adapt and test the program in other health care settings. If you are interested in partnering with us on future research initiatives, please contact the IMPACT coordinating center.

Voices of IMPACT researchers

Walter Borschel, LCSW, CHE, Kaiser Permanente Southern California: “These findings are so dramatic that if they were about any other disease – 50% improvement in people with hypertension or coronary heart disease, for example – it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.”

Wayne Katon, MD, Professor and Vice Chair of Psychiatry, University of Washington: “To have an intervention effect at every site is a bit of a surprise because that hasn’t happened in a lot of trials. The fact that IMPACT worked so well even in sites that had more difficult populations because of so many other chronic stressor was both heartening and surprising.”

Polly Hitchcock-Noël, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Texas Health Science Center: “Offering patients a choice of treatment was so unusual in terms of depression research that it hooked me into wanting to be part of the study….If the patient doesn’t improve you ratchet up to the next level. That is where ‘usual care’ usually falls down on the job. In ‘usual care’ there is no structured system for assessing how patients are doing, so they are left hanging if treatments don’t work.”

John W. Williams, MD, MHSc, Duke University: “There wasn’t this site to site variability, which is extremely unusual, particularly when the intervention is not as simple as giving a pill, but a complex intervention. Sites differed in terms of their organization, their size, their complexity, their patient populations. Yet, despite these variations, IMPACT worked about the same. That was really surprising.”

Enid Hunkeler, MA, Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research: “At the core of the model is respect for the patient. What I love about the IMPACT model is that it pushed the psychiatry piece to come up with new things when people aren’t getting better, and it helps people solve problems and deal with very real and difficult situations in their lives. The beauty of the model is that it actually has found a way to take on a very difficult, very underserved population – often chronically depressed patients who nobody thought would get better – and helped them get better.”

* Originally published in the 2002 John A. Hartford Foundation annual report. Used with permission.