I Mostly—Or Only—Do Therapy. Assessment Isn’t For Me... Or Is It?

Using data and objective evidence to back up your clinical decision making can add important aspects to your practice.

Many clinicians consider therapy and assessment to be separate and never the twain shall meet. However, there’s still plenty of room for assessment in your clinical practice even if you are not involved in writing up evaluations. After all, during our training we are taught that “diagnosis drives treatment.” Having a good grasp of a client’s presenting concern as well as having a reliable means for tracking their progress in treatment are valuable tools for your practice. Read on for suggestions on ways to incorporate testing into your therapy work.

With so much symptom overlap between different clinical concerns, it can be difficult to pinpoint what you’re looking at clinically. Although we have faith in our clinical judgment, research tells us that it can have holes (Ridley & Shaw-Ridley, 2007), so obtaining an additional data-based, objective source of information could serve an instrumental role in providing high-quality care to clients. For clinicians who are not seeking to incorporate performance-based assessment into their clinical work, self-report measures, particularly those that include a collateral rater form, can be an excellent source of information.

Another area where formal assessment can be helpful to therapy clinicians is in tracking progress. Insurance payors are increasingly requesting data to support ongoing therapy (Wright et. al 2020). One way to provide this information is administering testing at regular intervals to obtain a sense of symptom severity and how well the client is responding to their current treatment. In addition to this information being helpful for you as a clinician and meeting the reporting needs of insurance companies, research indicates that clients can benefit from knowledge and discussion about the progress in treatment (Reese et al., 2009).

We often think of a many-hours long assessment battery. However, effective assessment need not involve a battery of measures—particularly when clinicians are seeking targeted information. If you would like to administer short mental-health screeners, our ChecKIT platform is for you. It provides access to common mental health screeners with the added benefit of a brief score report so there is no need to spend time hand scoring. Additionally, administering ChecKIT measures via PARiConnect enables you to track your client’s progress. For those situations where you are seeking more detailed information about a client’s functioning, you have the option of administering a full measure. For example, the Social Emotional Assets and Resilience Scales (SEARS) provides information on the psychosocial strengths of children and adolescents ages 5–18 years, has parent, teacher, and self-report forms, and PARiConnect provides access to integrated reports and progress monitoring.

As always, before administering a measure to a client, read about the standardization sample in the manual to determine if your client is an appropriate candidate for the measure. Whether your assessment needs are to inform therapy with a client or to administer a larger testing battery, PAR is happy to be able to provide for your assessment needs.

References

Reese, R. J., Norsworthy, L. A., & Rowlands, S. R. (2009). Does a continuous feedback system improve psychotherapy outcome? Psychotherapy Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 46, 418–431. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22121836/

Ridley, C. R., & Shaw-Ridley, M. (2007). Clinical judgment accuracy: From meta-analysis to metatheory. The Counseling Psychologist, 37, 400–409. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0011000008330830

Wright, C. V., Goodheart, C., Bard, D., Bobbitt, B. L., Butt, Z., Lysell, K., McKay, D., & Stephens, K. (2020). Promoting measurement-based care and quality measure development: The APA mental and behavioral health registry initiative. Psychological Services, 17, 262–270. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ser0000347