Treatment dissemination and evidence-based practice: Strengthening intervention through clinician-researcher collaboration

Youth clinical practice and research have rich traditions and share important goals. Linking the two traditions could capitalize on their complementary strengths. The thoughtful review by Herschell, McNeil, and McNeil (this issue) highlights several efforts at linkage; these could help launch a new generation of collaborative work. In this work, several aims will require attention: (a) building consensus on how to identify empirically supported treatments, (b) matching these treatments with empirically sound assessment and diagnosis in practice, (c) expanding the concept of evidence-based practice to encompass an assessment-intervention dialectic, (d) ongoing testing of the impact of evidence-based care on practice outcomes, and (e) rethinking the model that guides intervention development, by focusing on what is needed for eventual deployment.