Polaris-MH (Mental Health)
Better mental health outcomes at lower costs
Polaris Health Directions recently released the latest generation of Polaris-MH, its mental health outcomes assessment system. New features include an enhanced substance abuse assessment with scales from the Addiction Severity Index and a graph to illustrate a patient’s expected treatment response in relation to actual progress.
Polaris-MH helps providers with the initial patient evaluation, treatment planning, and monitoring of patient progress and satisfaction.
The system supports multiple administrations during treatment, and reflects the needs of all those with a vested interest in the treatment process: patients, clinicians, clinical managers/administrators, case managers/utilization reviewers and payers.
Polaris-MH contains numerous innovative features including:
✔ Measures for a broad range of patient strengths and problems using psychometrically strong scales.
✔ Full automation of Polaris-MH administration, scheduling, scoring, reporting
✔ Privacy-protected, HIPAA-compliant database management
✔ Substance abuse assessment: Addiction Severity Index scales for patients that screen positive for substance abuse; the score indicates severity of abuse in relation to norms for thousands of patients (*Newly enhanced feature!)
✔ Resilience percentile score: What’s a patient’s ability to “bounce back” in relation to thousands of mental health patients. (*Newly enhanced feature!)
✔ Clinically actionable, real-time patient reports printed on site: View a sample intake (pdf) or update (pdf) report.
✔ Inconsistency score included on reports to alert the therapist that a patient may not have responded authentically (data quality indicators). (*Newly enhanced feature!)
✔ Available in English, Spanish and French
✔ Low staff and respondent (i.e., patient) burden; surveys can be completed in fifteen minutes or less- five minutes for abbreviated Update assessments
✔ Availability of a short form for fax to further reduce respondent burden (*Newly enhanced feature!)
✔ Ease of integration into clinical practice
✔ Patient items require a 6th grade reading level
✔ Presentation of both patient and clinician perspectives
✔ Evidence-based monitoring: A graph is included on all intake and update patient assessment reports to illustrate patient progress against the Expected Treatment Response (*Newly enhanced feature!)
The Science Behind the Solution
Polaris-MH is based upon more than a decade of research and development by internationally renowned scientists and the invaluable contributions from clinicians, patients, utilization review professionals, provider system administrators and managed care executives. It combines a strong scientific foundation with state-of-the-art technology to help health care organizations provide higher quality and more cost-effective services, and to document mental health treatment outcomes for payers and accreditation organizations.
Scales
Polaris-MH screens for general health problems, vocational and social functioning, substance abuse and behavioral and mental health problems, including psychosis and bipolar disorder. As with all Polaris products, it is strength-based, and provides measures of resilience, meaning, treatment motivation, satisfaction with treatment and the therapeutic bond.
Expected Treatment Response
Predictive capability is a particularly significant innovation for Polaris-MH. Advanced statistical techniques pioneered by Polaris co-founder Dr. Kenneth Howard were used to project an Expected Treatment Response (ETR) that is based upon a patient's initial severity, treatment history, motivation and strengths, among other factors. This enables the therapist and clinical supervisors to monitor progress in relation to the patient's ETR, which provides an evidence-based method for deciding whether treatment is working.
Polaris-MH also includes an optional counselor questionnaire designed for programs that intend to use the system for utilization review, clinical supervision, or to improve the ability to predict a patient’s response to treatment. The form requires less than five minutes to complete at intake; update questionnaires take about two minutes. The counselor may provide DSM codes, case severity indicators, and an assessment of the patient’s motivation for treatment, severity of symptoms and functional disability, progress, and prognosis.
