title: Improving suicide risk assessment in a managed-care environment.
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.
authors.affiliation: Center for Clinical Informatics, LLC, Salt Lake City, UT 84117, USA, jebbrown@clinical-informatics.com
authors.forename: G S
authors.initials: GS
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.forename: Edward R
authors.initials: ER
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.forename: Ellen
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Betts
authors.forename: Jingyang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wu
mesh_terms: D002140:California; D003419:Crisis Intervention; D003955:Diagnostic Tests, Routine; D006801:Humans; D008329:Managed Care Programs; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000639:trends; D013406:Suicide, Attempted / Q000517:prevention & control* / Q000523:psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires