The

Institute for Better Health

Representing the Cutting Edge in Professional Education

The Institute for Better Health (IBH) is a non-profit, 501 (c)(3) charitable organization located in Santa Rosa, CA. The overall goal of IBH is to provide tools and education that increases the competency, knowledge, skills, and performance quality of healthcare professionals, and enhance the quality of client outcomes among the diverse populations they serve through the effective and culturally sensitive management of the biopsychosocial aspects of human development.

For nearly 50 years, the mission of the Institute for Better Health (IBH) has focused on educating behavioral health professionals to better empower patients to improve their lives. In its modern form, IBH seeks to help behavioral health professionals achieve practice effectiveness and efficiency based on idiographically applicable technological tools that identify, model, and help target known processes of change.

IBH believes that process-based interventions are the future of behavioral health science and have the potential to help millions of people.  IBH believes clinical tools and research linking processes of change to client outcomes will help practitioners plan more effective and efficient process-focused treatments.

​The first IBH technological product, a case conceptualization app called MindGrapher ™, uses person-specific evidence on processes of change and modern idionomic statistical science to identify key process of change targets for individual clients. Unlike traditional statistics that looks for truth at the level of collections of people and treats individuals as "error terms'', in an idionomic approach, people are never gathered into sub-groups of any kind until their unique voice is fully heard and their unique lives are modelled. Then and only then, similarities to others are considered, but only if doing so helps us understand most individuals even better. We believe this approach is ideal for  empirically driven process-based  case conceptualization.  MindGrapher ™ is due for initial beta release in fall 2023.

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We are now collecting information for those interested in being notified when MindGrapher ™ is released. If you are interested in participating in this program, please click here to complete this short survey and to express your interest.

The History of IBH

In the 1970s, the Institute for the Advancement of Human Behavior sprang from a single conference for behavioral health professionals called “Taking Charge of Your Own Life.” The 1,600 attendees learned about how to empower their patients and gained Continuing Education Credits (CEs) for doing so. In the late 1980s, the renamed Institute for Behavioral Healthcare provided training workshops, conferences, and training videotapes particularly in the areas of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and managed behavioral health care. IBH also began managing the CE certification process for a number of other training institutions,

After nearly 50 years at the helm, IBH’s founder and president Gerry Piaget, PhD. began to plan for retirement. In 2017, the renamed Institute for Better Health began a plan to transition. IBH hired Praxis Continuing Education and Training – a subsidiary of New Harbinger Publications to oversee the management of current CE activities and partners, as well as the overall change of the direction of the organization and a mostly new Board of Directors. With its expertise and scale, Praxis was able to ensure that IBH’s workshops, conferences, and continuing education mission continued in capable hands.

When Dr. Piaget retired in 2021, a former IBH workshop presenter, Steven C. Hayes, PhD, became President of IBH and began its transition from being a provider of clinical workshops and CE certification, to a provider of technological support and clinically-relevant research based on cutting edge behavioral health science.

Background: Today's Challenge & Solution

​IBH recognizes the challenges facing those providing behavioral health services today.

The ongoing shortage of behavioral health providers requires new forms of delivery of behavioral health care to reach more people.   We are faced with the dramatically increasing need for mental health and wellness services combined with insufficient numbers of providers available to provide individualized services.  This means that we must think beyond traditional face-to-face psychotherapy sessions to other methods – books, apps, or follow-up from a care-giver – that can be effective, scalable, and reach more individuals with limited numbers of professionals achieving efficiencies through improved care. Where face-to-face methods are appropriate, we need new case conceptualization and intervention support tools to better manage process-based care and to increase its efficiency. We believe that the range of providers will continue to expand, but technology will be needed to support high-quality evidence-based care as that occurs.

Unfortunately, today’s new behavioral health technologies are often not science-based and virtually never are designed to improve the underlying science. There is often no or limited scientific proof that new technologies are effective, nor are they designed to provide future direction to behavioral health in a scientifically sound and public process of development and dissemination of knowledge.  A technological approach that is both science-based and science-enhancing will set a precedent that other behavioral health technologies could emulate.

We believe that process-based therapy (PBT) will alter clinical practice and research and practice-based interventions (PBI) more generally. While Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has been generally recognized as the treatment with the most extensive empirical support, it has evolved over time and there are evidence-based forms of interventions that are not strictly part of the behavioral and cognitive therapies. There has been an increase in attention paid to processes of change across the spectrum of evidence-based therapies and more clinically based therapies alike.  PBIs are rapidly becoming the vital core of CBT itself, but it is expanding rapidly beyond even that broad umbrella. Modern evidence-based therapy places much less focus on protocols for syndromes and more focus on evidence-based process linked to evidence-based procedures. As PBI evolves, core processes that are used in new forms of functional analysis, and person-based applications, will become more central.

The IBH solution is an eco-system that will:

  1. Utilize modern technology (e.g., online apps/training) to reach professionals in mental and behavioral health care;
  2. Ensure that the technology is science-based in a fashion that is ethical, prosocial, idiographically valid, progressive, and effective; and
  3. Focus on processes of change known to foster behavioral strength and mental resilience to enable and empower individuals to prosper in the mental, physical, and social realms of their lives.

The IBH ecosystem envisions a databank of fully anonymized longitudinal consumer health data held under IBH as a charitable organization, controlled by a Board of committed experts, with an Advisory Board of respected professionals, and a Scientific Advisory Council to ensure non-proprietary scholarly access to databased answers to important questions. For profit companies may eventually license aspects of the developed technology, provided that doing so serves prosocial purposes, but never at the cost of the integrity and security of consumer data.

Creation of this eco-system leverages the history of IBH as a respected, independent organization that can be trusted to balance the patients/consumers’ need for privacy of their health information and researchers’ need for access to data while aggregating, securing, and controlling access to the process of change data for further research and application developments.

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