Measurement based care often evokes controversies. A brilliant colleague, Carol Heckler, who is something of a local expert in psychopharmacology, interrupted a conversation I was having with another psychiatrist to say that she thought that standardized rating scales were useless. Echoing comments that I’ve heard from many of my patients, she said “how can you reduce human experience to a number?” This …
Measurement Based Care Improves Outcomes
Patients at Gateway Psychiatric are sometimes perplexed by the amount of time and energy we devote to tracking how they are doing. It can seem annoying to answer questions repeatedly or to fill out forms. An article in the journal Psychiatric Services summarizes the data that shows that this process (known as “measurement based care” or MBC) is associated with significantly …