In order for us to offer you the best treatment possible, we have instituted two components as quality improvement; that is, to evaluate the effectiveness of DBT:

Quality Improvement Interviews

Quality Improvement (QI) is how a clinic evaluates client outcomes (positive and negative) to understand where services should be improved. The interview questions are related to the problems that brought you to DBT, your strengths, and the treatment services you have received. If you decide to drop out of the program, we will still attempt to contact you and ask you if you would be willing to complete the assessments because we learn as much from those who drop out as from those who graduate.
 
Your participation in the QI project is kept more confidential than your medical record as it will not be released if/when you release your Harborview records to others. If you want anyone outside of Harborview to see this information, you will need to make special arrangements with us and we can generally only provide a summary. We may ask your permission to use this information anonymously as part of summaries about DBT in presentations or articles outside of Harborview (e.g., “The average emotional dysregulation of clients in DBT was xxx”).

Videotaping

One of the best ways to maintain high-quality therapy is to monitor sessions using videotaping. We’ve found this to be very beneficial for our clients. Therefore, as part of the program, we require that you agree to have some or all of your sessions videotaped. The purpose of the videotaping is for Harborview DBT to be able to help your therapist provide top quality therapy. These tapes will primarily be used as a tool for your therapist when s/he is receiving supervision or during team consultation. The tapes are confidential and will not be viewed by anyone outside your treatment team without your explicit permission.