INSIGHT Behavioral

INSIGHT Behavioral is a state-of-the-art, easy-to-use, HIPAA-compliant program that collects data from patients about how they're feeling and summarizes it for their clinicians in real time in easily-understandable graphs so they can use it to inform clinical care. Designed specifically to meet the needs of general behavioral healthcare treatment programs for measurement-based care, INSIGHT Behavioral provides the proven benefits of Progress Monitoring to clinicians and treatment center personnel.

Pre-Treatment Baseline Information

INSIGHT Behavioral asks each patient to tell us the following about the month before they started treatment:

Identification of Underlying Mental Disorders: INSIGHT Behavioral’s intake questionnaire starts with a quick screen to find patients who may be suffering symptoms of one of the most common mental health disorders -- depression, anxiety, trauma, mania, psychosis, or eating disorders. Patients who answer any of the initial screening questions positively are then asked a more in-depth series of questions using academically-validated screening instruments to determine the severity of their symptoms.

Suicidal Ideation & Self-Harming Behavior: Using the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale, patient are asked about any suicidal thoughts they had or actions they took to end their life prior to treatment. They are also asked if they have been self-harming and, if so, how frequently.
Functioning: All patients are given a quick screen to identify how much their emotional issues are interfering with their ability to complete their day-to-day activities.

Medication Adherence: atients who have been prescribed one or more medications are asked about whether they have been taking all of their prescribed medications and, if not, why not.
Quality of Life Information: Various quality of life measures, such as whether they were living in a stable home environment and whether they were employed or in school, are asked.

The data generated through this online questionnaire serves as the baseline for the Progress Monitoring conducted while the patient remains in treatment and, should the center so desire, for separate outcomes research during the first year after treatment.

In-Treatment Monitoring

While they are in treatment, patients are asked to submit a Progress Monitoring survey every week or two, on whatever schedule their counselor requests. Because this questionnaire only asks about issues INSIGHT knows they are struggling with, this update usually takes less than 4 minutes to submit. Each update screens for key factors to assess how the patients are improving.

Severity of Mental Disorder Symptoms: Patients are asked a series of questions about the different disorders that were identified as problems during the Intake Questionnaire. A graph of the patient’s symptom severity over time is provided to their clinician for each issue that has been identified, including day-to-day functioning for SMI patients. The bar on the left shows how the patient reported feeling prior to entering treatment:

Medication Adherence: INSIGHT Behavioral tracks the amount of their prescribed medication that patients report taking over time.

Satisfaction with Treatment: INSIGHT also tracks satisfaction with treatment, including patient answers to an optional "Why?" question:

INSIGHT also tracks how many days per week the patient reported attending treatment if they're in outpatient treatment, and the quality of their relationships with either their closest family members or their parent(s)/guardian(s), depending upon the patient's age.

Data submitted to INSIGHT is available in real time on the INSIGHT website so clinicians can use it to inform clinical care.

Identifying Patients Who Are Not Progressing As Expected

Individual graphs for each patient are provided to counselors every time a new survey is submitted so that they can adjust treatment accordingly. However, it would be cumbersome for managers of treatment programs to have to review dozens of individual patient reports in order to identify those who are not making appropriate progress. To provide managers and owners of treatment centers a quick read on how their patients are doing, Vista summarizes the progress monitoring data for groups of patients (such as the Tuesday outpatient group or the Women's Program).

Because we expect that patients should see a decrease in the severity of their symptoms the longer they are in treatment, the INSIGHT programs graph the most recent data for each current patient as a function of how long they've been in treatment. As an example, the following graph shows the severity of depression symptoms counselor Jane's patients are experiencing as a function of the time they've been in treatment. Management can see at a glance that one of the patients is not progressing as well as expected:

The INSIGHT products label the patients whose scores are in the danger zone and combine all the relevant graphs into one report. This makes it very easy to see at a glance which of the patients in a group aren't doing well and may need additional help: