Citation

Brown GS, Jones ER, Betts E, Wu J. Crisis 2003; 24(2): 49-55.

Affiliation

Center for Clinical Informatics, LLC, Salt Lake City, UT 84117, USA, jebbrown@clinical-informatics.com

Copyright

(Copyright © 2003, International Association for Suicide Prevention, Publisher Hogrefe Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

12880222

Abstract

This article describes the quality improvement intervention of a managed behavioral healthcare company to improve the quality of suicide risk assessments by its panel of providers. At-risk cases are identified by the patient's self-reported high frequency of suicidal ideation on a standardized outcome measure. Clinicians also assess severity of suicidal ideation based on clinical interviews. The clinician's assessment is identified as probably erroneous if the patient report indicates a high frequency of suicidal ideation and the clinicians assessment of suicidal ideation is none. The article describes the methods used to encourage clinicians to utilize information from the patient self-report measure as part of the clinical assessment. Probable suicidal ideation assessment errors were subsequently reduced by 29% over a 1-year period of administration.

Language: en