Comprehensive Patient-Reported Outcomes Tracking Solution for State SPMI Clients

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall aim of this project is to develop a complete mental health screening and outcomes tracking package for use by state mental health agencies. The package will feature a set of public-domain item banks for the domains most frequently requested by administrators and clinicians and items and domains specified by PROMIS and SAMHSA's National Outcomes Measures (NOMs) and Uniform Reporting Standards (URS). States or agencies will be able to choose the domains and items most relevant to their needs, as well as technological solutions for collecting patient-reported data and delivering reports to stakeholders. This Phase I project will develop and pretest new items in English for 14 new domains, translate items into Spanish for four established domains, and pretest these Spanish items. Full validation of both English- and Spanish- language items on SPMI clients, using IRT analysis and comparisons with gold standard instruments, will be completed in Phase II. New items will be generated in English for 14 new domains, based on core concepts relevant to each domain; items will be generated by integrating information from DSM- IV-TR, existing instruments, and standards established by PROMIS, NOM, MHSIP, and URS. Item pretesting will include expert panel review and cognitive interviews with a representative sample of SPMI clients. Spanish translation will include multiple forward translations and a back translation, which will be reconciled via translator consensus and expert panel review. Spanish-language items in four established domains will also undergo pilot testing via cognitive interviewing with a representative sample of Spanish- speaking SPMI clients. The object of this proposal is a complete, comprehensive outcomes tracking system for use by state mental health agencies, including both a modular, public domain instrument and appropriate technology for data gathering and reporting. The centerpiece of the system will be a set of public-domain item banks comprising those domains identified as most useful to state mental health systems, as well as domains and items required by federal outcomes tracking initiatives. The creation of such a resource will allow collection of uniform data sets across states for identification of best practices and efficient resource allocation. The result will be better care for patients, better resources for state administrators to use in decision making, and more uniform data regarding mental health systems for federal, state, and local stakeholders.