Clinical status - Charting for outcomes in behavioral health

Assessment of mental health outcomes is rapidly becoming a routine part of clinical practice across all disciplines and levels of care. Empiric effectiveness data are required by government, payer, and accrediting organizations, in addition to meeting requirements, outcome data may be useful to justify payer expenditures, guide quality improvement efforts, enable interprogram comparisons, and facilitate payers' and consumers' choices of providers. Six broad criteria should be met for outcome data to be maximally useful: (1) selection of meaningful, reliable, and valid outcome indicators that are feasible to implement across multiple levels of care; (2) standardization of outcome indicators and their operational definitions; (3) representative sampling; (4) accurate and complete data collection; (5) appropriate data analytic techniques; and (6) understandable feedback of results to stakeholders. This article discusses the important aspects of these criteria, describes the challenges faced by the field in meeting these criteria, and suggests processes and systems to enhance the potential usefulness of outcome data.