Clinical outcomes assessment in behavioral healthcare: searching for practical solutions.

: Most quality management initiatives in behavioral healthcare have focused on adverse events, clinical processes, or cost variables. Considerably less attention has been paid to indices of clinical improvement, likely because of a lack of agreed-upon measures of improvement, a lack of availability of simple methods for data collection and analysis, and an inability to provide timely feedback regarding clinical improvement, among other reasons. A computerized system was designed to collect relevant psychiatric symptom ratings in a manner that allows for real-time feedback at the patient and clinician levels regarding clinical improvement and for higher-level, administrative evaluation of overall clinic performance. The costs and benefits of this system are discussed.