The work of therapists and counsellors is generally considered unquantifiable. Addressing patients’ emotional quality of life doesn’t produce immediate results or deliver linear improvements.
One of the biggest frustrations for solo and small practitioners is when clients drop out without a final session or providing feedback. Without knowing what went wrong–or right–it’s impossible to address the aspects of your practice that aren’t delivering results. Using feedback-informed treatment software provides you with quantifiable data from patients regarding the therapist/counsellor relationship, their participation in therapy, and their overall well-being.
With the benefit of data, you can adjust your services to better connect with patients, prevent dropouts, and grow your client base.
What is feedback-informed treatment (FIT)?
Overall, mental health professionals receive minimal feedback from their clients. One reason is many therapists and counsellors believe they’re checking in with clients more often than they are in actuality. Also, giving candid feedback at the moment is awkward for many patients. Or, patients can have trouble isolating the feelings generated by the therapeutic process from the effectiveness of the therapy itself.
Feedback-informed treatment uses two surveys, the Outcome Rating Scale (ORS) and the Session Rating Scale (SRS), to generate a culture of active feedback between the client and the therapist or counsellor. The scales ask patients to record their overall well-being and their feelings about individual sessions. By registering data over time, mental health practitioners can address their shortcomings and adapt their practice to be more effective.
Tips for incorporating FIT software into your practice
For many practitioners, the ORS and SRS on their own don’t provide enough insight to generate significant change. Each is a handful of questions, but the data may not hold much meaning without algorithmic analysis. FIT software from MyOutcomes makes administering the ORS and SRS fast and easy––done with an app on a tablet––to avoid disruption to the session.
- Ask clients to respond to the ORS questions on a provided tablet before beginning the session.
- Close the session with the SRS and provide an opportunity for clients to give verbal feedback.
- MyOutcomes makes it easy to enter ORS/SRS recorded on paper if there are issues with the tablet during a session.
- Both surveys take a minute or less for clients to respond to, preserving vital session time.
Over time, MyOutcomes uses algorithmic metrics and reporting tools to analyze and portray the data in a way that makes it easy to identify and improve your practice’s weak areas.
Benefits of feedback-informed treatment in therapy/counselling
For both patients and therapists/counsellors, the question of “is this working?” can pervade the therapeutic process on micro and macro levels. Feedback-informed treatment answers that question with data, portrayed in easy-to-understand visuals with MyOutcomes.
Mental health practitioners can find the weak areas of individual sessions or their practice as a whole. By understanding where clients feel dissatisfaction, you can prevent dropout and frustration.
Feedback-informed treatment makes it easier to grow your practice, by highlighting your areas of strength and becoming more responsive to meet client needs better. Patients receive better care, and therapists/counsellors get quantitative insight into the efficacy of their services.
MyOutcomes offers feedback-informed treatment software to help mental health professionals deliver more effective care.
MyOutcomes targets some of the pain points in therapy/counselling services, such as patient dropout, while also helping your practice’s client base grow. FIT software reduces the disruption from administering the ORS and SRS and interprets the data so your practice can get actionable feedback. Even if you’ve used rating scales in your work before, without analyzing and interpreting the data over time, you may not experience clear benefits.
MyOutcomes takes the data from ORS and SRS and provides practitioners with metrics to achieve their goals, from stronger therapeutic relationships to more clients rebooking and growing your practice. We’re here with training, ongoing support, and critical resources to optimize your experience using feedback-informed treatment in your practice.
