Participatory System Dynamics vs Usual Quality Improvement: Staff Use of Simulation as an Effective, Scalable and Affordable Way to Improve Timely Mental Health Care?
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT04208217. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
Data is sourced from official ClinicalTrials.gov public API records. Always review the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for the latest information.
Official title
Participatory System Dynamics vs Usual Quality Improvement: Is Staff Use of Simulation an Effective, Scalable and Affordable Way to Improve Timely Veteran Access to High-quality Mental Health Care?
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
Evidence-based VA care is best for meeting Veterans' mental health needs, such as depression, PTSD and opioid use disorder, to prevent suicide or overdose. But some key evidence-based practices only reach 3-28% of patients. Participatory system dynamics (PSD) helps improve quality with existing resources, critical in mental health and all VA health care. PSD uses learning simulations to improve staff decisions, showing how goals for quality can best be achieved given local resources and constraints. This study aims to significantly increase the proportion of patients who start and complete evidence-based care, and determine the costs of using PSD for improvement. Empowering frontline staff with PSD simulation encourages safe 'virtual' prototyping of complex changes to scheduling, referrals and staffing, before translating changes to the 'real world.' This study determines if PSD increases Veteran access to the highest quality care, and if PSD better maximizes VA resources when compared against usual trial-and-error approaches to improving quality.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT04208217
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not applicable
- Enrollment
- 720 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
Interventions
- Modeling to Learn (MTL) Behavioral
- Usual quality improvement (QI) Behavioral
Behavioral
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 18 Years and older
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Accepts healthy volunteers
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- Jul 21, 2021
- Primary completion
- Jan 30, 2026
- Completion
- Jan 30, 2026
- Last update posted
- May 10, 2026
2021 – 2026
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 1
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 1
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA | Palo Alto | California | 94304-1207 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT04208217, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted May 10, 2026 · Synced Sep 11, 2026
Related: full search, browse by condition, browse by drug or therapy, browse by sponsor, browse by U.S. city.
Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT04208217 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.