Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Nov 24, 2017
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 24, 2017 - Jan 19, 2018
Date Accepted: Feb 28, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A Smart Screening Device for Patients with Mental Health Problems in Primary Health Care: Development and Pilot Study
Background:
Adequate recognition of mental health problems is a prerequisite for successful treatment. Although most people tend to consult their general practitioner (GP) when they first experience mental health problems, GPs are not very well equipped to screen for various forms of psychopathology to help them determine clients’ need for treatment.
Objective:
In this paper, the development and characteristics of CATja, a computerized adaptive test battery built to facilitate triage in primary care settings, are described, and first results of its implementation are reported.
Methods:
CATja was developed in close collaboration with GPs and mental health assistants (MHAs). During implementation, MHAs were requested to appraise clients’ rankings (N=91) on the domains to be tested and to indicate the treatment level they deemed most appropriate for clients before test administration. We compared the agreement between domain score appraisals and domain score computed by CATja and the agreement between initial (before test administration) treatment level advice and final treatment level advice.
Results:
Agreements (Cohen kappas) between MHAs’ appraisals of clients’ scores and clients’ scores computed by CATja were mostly between .40 and .50 (Cohen kappas=.10-.20), and the agreement between “initial” treatment levels and the final treatment level advised was .65 (Cohen kappa=.55).
Conclusions:
Using CATja, caregivers can efficiently generate summaries of their clients’ mental well-being on which decisions about treatment type and care level may be based. Further validation research is needed.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.