SEPTEMBER 18, 2026
Sophia Bartels, PhD
Lindsey Zimmerman, PhD
Stanford Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Division of Public Mental Health and Population Sciences
Co-Lead, Design & Modeling Section
Center for Dissemination and Implementation at Stanford (CDIAS)
About the Presentation: Despite substantial investment in expanding access to effective behavioral health treatments, many patients still do not receive them. Prominent implementation science approaches, including assessments of barriers and facilitators using frameworks such as CFIR 2.0, may not fully capture the causal mechanisms and dynamic interactions that shape treatment reach. This talk introduces Modeling to Learn (MTL), a system dynamics approach that models treatment “start” and “dose” calibrated to local EHR data. Psychotherapy and medication-management use cases illustrate how decision-makers can adjust treatment duration and follow-up intervals to free capacity for timely, high-quality care. MTL addresses the way engagement, decision-making, resource constraints, and local needs interact over time in persistent implementation problems.
About the Presenters: Dr. Sophie Bartels is a research health scientist at the Center for Health Optimization and Implementation Research (CHOIR) at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Dr. Bartels has over 8 years of experience evaluating the implementation of evidence-based mental health, substance use disorder, and HIV interventions and testing strategies to scale them up in healthcare settings both domestically and internationally. Her work includes using mixed methods to assess sustainment of evidence-based interventions and to test the effectiveness of novel implementation strategies, with a focus on improving outcomes for individuals experiencing or at risk of homelessness.
Dr. Lindsey Zimmerman is Principal Investigator of NIH, VA and SAMSHA awards evaluating Participatory System Dynamics (PSD) as a strategy for increasing the reach of evidence-based behavioral health care (https://mtl.how/team). PSD is an innovative approach to resolving problems with patient flow and improving evidence-based decision-making (Zimmerman et al., 2016). In the current Office of Mental Health (OMH) co-developed release, Modeling to Learn 3.7 provides an accredited, pre-packaged, 1-hour consult to VA facility leadership to identify local improvements in evidence-based episodes of psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy. MTL uses cases are available at https://mtl.how/manual for VA Medical Center (VAMC) PTSD Clinical Teams (PCTs) and Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Programs, and Community-based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) and Behavioral Health Integration Program (BHIP) teams. Archived MTL 3.0 external implementation facilitation session guides and videos are available at https://mtl.how/facilitation. Lindsey also serves as research mentor to VA Implementation Research Institute (IRI) fellows funded by NIMH, NIDA and VA, and she co-leads the Design and Modeling Section of the Center for Dissemination and Implementation at Stanford (CDIAS; PI McGovern P50DA054072).