Why use assessments?
Every day, there are multiple demands placed on your time and attention. You're under constant pressure to save time, screen and diagnose accurately, and treat quickly without compromising patient care.

Administering health-care specific assessments can help with these pressures. Validated assessments provide you with reliable information you can use to diagnose problems and prescribe a course of care.

If a patient is experiencing depression, you have a measure of how serious their problem is before you talk with them. If a chronically ill patient is having problems adhering to their care program, you'll know immediately and be ready to discuss alternatives with them.

Patient Tools' assessments focus on disease specific intake, adherence, co-morbid complications, risk management, and quality of life across a broad spectrum of chronic illnesses and conditions. Real-time reports let you make the best use of the face-to-face time with your patient, discussing the optimal treatment program based on their individual needs.

You save time, and have better information to provide better patient care.

How Assessments Work
Imagine if you implemented a Patient Tools assessment program with your patients.

A patient in the waiting room is asked to complete an assessment. Seconds after they've finished, the assessment is scored and a report is printed. Before you walk into the examination room, you have the report in your hand and you're a step ahead. You have a good idea of the patient's specific concerns that day and you're able to spend the appointment time directly addressing those concerns.

You can use the time you would have spent identifying the problem for solving it.

Easy to use. The patient self-administers the test in minutes with a survey unit. They answer a list of diagnostic questions that are non-intimidating and non-threatening and have been objectively validated.

Reduces time. Because the assessment is automated, the routine screening and/or diagnostic questions that would be asked by you or your staff are handled electronically. There's no disruption to your office routine. There's no need to devote staff time to administration or scoring.

Immediate results. We provide a real-time report, available immediately, before you see the patient. You have quantifiable, objective data to help you make informed treatment decisions. Therefore, you can go directly to discussing specific problems, resulting in better patient health faster.

Tracks patients’ progress. The assessment can be repeated at specified intervals to detect improvement or decline and the necessary adjustments made to ensure better patient health. Trended reports make analyzing progress easy.

Automating provides other benefits as well. Your practice's data is gathered into a database you can access at any time for analysis. You can track patient outcomes and monitor responses to treatment programs across your patient population. You can improve efficiencies by knowing where to devote your time and resources.

Detect both presented and underlying issues. Assessments can also uncover information that might get overlooked during a normal examination. They can identify underlying issues or comorbidity. Psychiatric symptoms could manifest themselves as an organic illness leading you to spend valuable time trying to rule out medical causes that do not exist. Assessing a patient's psychosocial condition can pinpoint these problems up front.

In-depth follow-up. After using the results of the initial intake assessment, if your examination of the patient indicates more in-depth information is needed, comprehensive follow-up assessments can be administered as well. Just like a lab test, these condition-specific assessments can reliably screen for the problems that you suspect are present.

Still skeptical?
A recent study in the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association used a computerized self-assessment tool to record the degree of severity of symptoms. Results indicated that clinicians who received assessment summaries addressed some 51% of their patients' symptoms on average, compared with only 19% of patient symptoms addressed by the control clinicians.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recently encouraged family physicians to use assessments to screen adult patients for depression.Their study found that “5 percent to 9 percent of adult patients in primary care settings suffer from depression. Depression is often disguised by other problems, and up to 50 percent of these cases go undetected and therefore, untreated.”

Patients Tools also:
• Uses individual patient data analysis and population-level management to improve clinical efficiencies.
• Harnesses the power of technology to provide you with real-time reports providing real-time information, enterprise-wide.
• Provides the quantifiable evidence-based documentation you need to develop favorable outcome programs that give you the objective information you need to improve patient care and quality of life.

Patient Tools has a program to meet your clinical needs.

Our INFOCore products focus on intake forms for specific populations. If you're interested in a specific disease or assessment, click on the individual assessment below. We're adding new assessments all the time, so please contact us if you have a topic we’re currently not offering.

If you want a comprehensive program with multiple assessments to establish a disease management and outcomes program, INFOSuites is your answer.

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