Project MATCH

The Project for Matching Alcoholism Treatments to Client Heterogeneity (Project MATCH), organized by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), was a large-scale multisite clinical trial. This project aimed to test the general assumption that matching patients by their characteristics to particular treatment modalities would improve treatment outcomes. According to this hypothesis, patients who received treatment matched to their characteristics were predicted to be more likely to have better treatment outcomes compared with patients who were not matched or who were mismatched. Such assumptions of treatment matching effects, though long held, had not been stringently tested in a large and representative study prior to the development and implementation of Project MATCH. In the design of this study, a team of researchers devised specific ...