Does Your Practice Administer Mental Health Assessments?
Mental health, or psychiatric, assessments have been coming under fire lately because of their tedious process. Despite their monotonous nature, mental health assessments are so important and your medical clinic or doctor’s office should be offering them to your patients. Let United Physician Services show you the basics and importance of mental health assessments.
Although these assessments and tests may be monotonous and boring, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important! Follow these tricks of what not to do from Terence T. Gorski in Psych Central’s April 2014 article, both you and your patient won’t be bored brainless!
Mental Health Assessment Don’ts:
- Don’t view it as a meaningless task because it is required
If you view it as meaningless, very important specific information can be lost in the shuffle.
- Don’t tell the patient its something you HAVE to do before starting the appointment
This enables the patient to feel the same, which may cause them to withhold information since they do not believe it is important.
- Don’t start filling out the patient information on each and every paper while the patient is in the room
This makes it seem like you aren’t interested in what the patient has to say. Keep the repetitive information for the very beginning or the very end; do not fill it out while they’re talking (the boring information that is)!
- Don’t rush the patient through the assessment, or even the appointment
If you have them fill out their forms in a hurried manner, they will feel hurried to leave. If they have any questions, let them ask! These questions are important enough for them to think about, so they are important enough for you to listen to!
In the September article of Medical Economics, Russ Phillips, MD, director of the Center for Primary Care at Harvard Medical School, knows that both patients and practices will benefit from offering these mental health screenings.
Patients will have improved health. By addressing mental health issues to all your patients, you may be able to discover several patients living with disorders that they were unaware of or too nervous to talk about. By opening up the conversation, patients will have better overall health.
Also, practices will see a generous income as well. “One of the things we anticipate is there will be a positive return on investment, meaning the money we spend will be less than the savings that will be accrued by providing these services,” says Phillips. “So it will be a win-win for organizations to take on providing these resources in the future. We anticipate there will be new payment systems through accountable care organizations, and institutions will have the opportunity to commit resources to areas where they’ll achieve cost savings.”
If you need help learning how you can add assessments as a service to your medical practice offerings, which will translate into increased revenue, let United Physician Services refine your current processes.