Behavioral health questionnaires, sometimes administered as part of a behavioral health assessment, help healthcare providers screen for mental health concerns like depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD and trauma. In this blog post, we will go over what they are and highlight a few reasons why behavioral health questionnaires are one of the most important psychological assessment tools and techniques.
Before we get into why behavioral health questionnaires are used, let's answer a more global question: "What is the purpose of a behavioral health assessment?" When you examine mental health assessment examples, you’ll notice that most use a combination of tests to help provide a more complete picture of a patient’s behavioral well-being and functioning. For a behavioral health assessment, a doctor may combine findings from a physical exam, laboratory tests, and behavioral health questionnaires to help connect behavioral health and physical health issues. Questionnaires, whether administered verbally, electronically, or via pen and paper, are an important component of the behavioral health assessment process.
Behavioral health questionnaires are used in a variety of physician office and hospital settings to screen patients for specific disorders, such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and eating disorders. A behavioral health questionnaire might be completed as part of a broader mental health assessment, but it is also used in other situations, such as the Medicare annual wellness visit. Behavioral health questionnaires can be administered by a professional trained in psychological assessment tools and techniques such as a psychiatrist, psychologist, or social worker, and they can also be conducted by a primary care doctor or specialist.
Whether administered in the context of other mental health assessments or on its own, a questionnaire should be reliable and evidence-based. Other factors that add to a behavioral health questionnaire’s usefulness are whether it can be administered digitally and its ease of completion by patients.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and American Academy of Family Physicians recommend that primary care physicians screen adolescents aged 12 to 18 and all adults over 18 for depression. The most common behavioral health questionnaire found on mental health screening tools lists used for this purpose is the PHQ9, with PHQ standing for patient health questionnaire.
This behavioral health questionnaire is one of the most widely used tools for depression screening. As with any behavioral health questionnaire, the results from a PHQ9 are just one step in helping meet a patient’s behavioral health needs. Positive results for depression on the PHQ9 requires further evaluation by a care provider to confirm a depression diagnosis.
In addition, even though it is intended as a screening tool, the PHQ9 has increasingly become used as a diagnostic tool. Sometimes this behavioral health screener is even used in therapeutic decision-making, such as whether to prescribe certain pharmaceuticals. When used to make a diagnosis, mental health evaluation questions found in tools like the PHQ9 can do more harm than good.
Now let's review five reasons why it's important for healthcare providers to use behavioral health questionnaires.
Millions of people in the United States are affected by mental illness, and many of them go undiagnosed. An estimated 26% of U.S. adults experience mental illness, or about 1 in 4 people. Behavioral health questionnaires can help providers identify mental health concerns as part of one’s overall wellness check.
Approximately 50% of lifetime behavioral health conditions begin by age 14, and 75% begin by age 24. Yet, the average delay between when symptoms first appear and intervention is 11 years. Behavioral health questionnaires help providers make early diagnoses and shorten the time to treatment.
A good behavioral health questionnaire can help lead clinicians to more accurate diagnoses and effective treatments for mental illnesses. Early intervention can improve outcomes for patients. In addition, these questionnaires can be used to measure improvements and track progress during treatment.
Behavioral health questionnaires can pick up on mental health issues that may impact other aspects of a patient's health. For instance, people with serious behavioral illnesses are nearly twice as likely to develop cardiovascular and metabolic diseases as the general population. And behavioral health concerns like depression or anxiety can impact how a patient cares for their physical health.
For their findings to have wide applicability, researchers studying mental illness need valid, standardized tests. Behavioral health questionnaires are used to measure and track participants’ symptoms in clinical trials of pharmaceuticals and other treatments.
If you’re looking for other behavioral health assessment tools and mental health solutions that can support your efforts to more accurately and consistently identify, diagnose and monitor mental illness, contact us. Proem helps drive better outcomes for patients through our intelligent workflow engine that captures and shares data at every step of the behavioral healthcare process. We provide data-driven insights to help providers assess and diagnose mental illness with accuracy.