This 12-week learning collaborative focuses on training the clinician to use the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) and the Role Functioning Scale (RFS) as structured assessment tools to improve the quality of care for patients with serious mental illness. Clinicians will gain the expertise needed to administer the BPRS to assess symptoms by rating actual BPRS patient interviews and discussing their ratings in comparison to the “gold standard” consensus ratings. Participants will learn to use the RFS to assess daily functioning and use both symptom ratings and assessments of functioning as part of an evidence-based treatment approach for improving patient outcomes. Special attention will be placed on how to conduct these assessments remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, this course will help clinicians to develop and implement a Measurement-Based Care (MBC) model that can be incorporated into an agency’s clinical flow through the use of a data tracking system, be useful to multiple clinical disciplines, and help improve short-term and long-term patient outcomes. Course content will be provided that addresses the importance of equity and diversity in conducting symptom and functional assessments and in the delivery of MBC. Research will be presented regarding racial disparities in symptom severity, assessment of functioning, and treatment outcomes. By the end of this course, enrolled clinicians will have learned how to use two structured assessments in treatment planning and how to address barriers to the routine use of these objective measurements in a MBC approach to improve mental health care decisions.

Speaker: Joseph Ventura, PhD