WP 2 Comparing the Clinical and Cost-effectiveness of Internet-based Treatment and Treatment as Usual for Depression in Routine Primary and Specialised Health Service Settings

WP leader: Prof. dr. Pim Cuijpers, VUA
Affiliation: Professor of Clinical Psychology and head of the department of Clinical Psychology at the VU-VUmc

Objectives

The objective of WP 2 is to assess the feasibility and to compare the clinical and cost effectiveness of internet-based ‘blended’ depression treatment for adults with MDD in routine primary and specialised healthcare practices compared with TAU by means of multi-site randomised clinical trials.

[>> link to ‘RCT’]. It is assumed that both forms of treatment will lead to similar clinical improvements in patients (non-inferior), but that the blended form (internet-based combined with face-to-face treatments) can be offered at significantly lower costs.

Specific Objectives

  • To adapt the existing internet-based treatment platforms to the specific needs of the participating countries and trial requirements, i.e. ICT4Depression platform to the specific needs of the Netherlands, France, Poland, Germany, and the UK, and to adapt the Smiling is Fun platform to the specific needs of Spain, as well as to the Swedish and Swiss platforms
  • To enable the daily monitoring of the patients’ level of depression through mobile phone applications for use by all trial partners
  • To develop interfaces that allow communication between the various technical components of platforms that are part of the intervention tested in the trials
  • To develop a common technical infrastructure to gather, share and analyse data, which can be easily used to integrate analyses across all research sites