Implementation, Efficacy and Costs of Inpatient Equivalent Home-Treatment in German Mental Health Care

The overarching goal of the AKtiV trial is to examine implementation processes, treatment processes, clinical efficacy, costs, and subjective experiences of IEHT following §115d of the German Social Code Book Five (SGB-V)compared to inpatient treatment from the perspective of service users, relatives or rather informal care givers' , staff and other stakeholders in mental health care. To maximize transferability of study results and to cover a broad spectrum of IEHT experience, 10 hospitals from different regions of Germany (e.g. rural, urban, east, west) participate in this study. Combining routine data, primary data and prospective follow-up data, the study results will be based/ involve a comprehensive database. Further, the combination of clinical and health economic data will enable the assessment of costs and benefits from a national perspective, a particularity of importance, given that there are only a few studies with health economic evidence of acute outreach mental health care. The qualitative evaluation of processes and out-comes of IEHT uses a collaborative-participatory approach that aligns with current demands for more user orientation and/ or involvement of people and researchers with lived experience in the process of developing interventions and their evaluation. The mixed-methods design of the trial corresponds with current standards of empirical social research enabling the triangulation of hypothesis-confirming, quantifiable factors and hypothesis-generating, qualitative aspects. By parallelizing on one hand quantitative and qualitative data and on the other hand routine data with primary data, data on implementation processes and data on treatment processes, different facets from different perspectives and levels of IEHT are targeted. This allows for a comprehensive, holistic assessment of this innovative treatment offer.