Outcome measures – Good practice but should they be required?

Dear Colleagues,

I’ve noticed momentum building around Routine Outcome Monitoring. The APS and other groups are all supporting reforms to the Medicare system to include standardised outcome measures.

In order to help psychologists administer psychometric instruments I created the NovoPsych iPad app (NovoPsych.com) and we now have thousands of psychologists using it. It computes useful metrics, graphs results over time and has dozens of assessments (DASS-21, Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale, CORE-10 etc). If you’re not already involved, you can sign up for free via www.novopsych.com.

– For users of NovoPsych, I hope you might be able to use this thread to provide any feedback about how to make the tool more useful for you?

– For others, I wonder what you make of the recommendations as part of the Medicare review about mandatory Routine Outcome Monitoring? Do you agree that it is a good idea? Are you wary of it? I personally think it *could* be great, provided the requirements don’t add too much of an administrative burden, and streamlined software like NovoPsych can make the process easy. We also need to avoid a “big brother” approach.

All feedback is really useful.

Warm regards,

Dr Ben Buchanan