Mental Health Services Evaluation

McLean’s Mental Health Services Evaluation (MHSE) provides quality measurement and quality improvement support for the hospital.

MHSE is a national leader in behavioral health care and quality assessment for effective measurement and reporting. In addition to serving McLean and Mass General Brigham, we provide quality improvement tools, reporting, and support to over 250 hospitals and over 1000 locations in six countries and 5 languages. eBASIS WebScore, our online scoring and reporting database, is currently in use at about 100 facilities, 30 of which participate in comprehensive quarterly reporting, including control and comparison charts.

We collect the Behavior and Symptom Identification Scale (BASIS-24^®), Perceptions of Care (PoC), and the Hospital-Based Inpatient Psychiatric Services (HBIPS) data for McLean Hospital. Our team analyzes the data and reports results for these and other measures.

MHSE also provides custom analysis and reporting services tailored to meet the unique needs of various programs and specialized projects at McLean and Partners.

MHSE is led by Thomaskutty Idiculla, PhD. To learn more, please visit our website.

Quality Measurements

The mission of MHSE is to support McLean’s quality improvement and patient care goals.

Perceptions of Care (PoC)

McLean’s Perceptions of Care (PoC) survey provides McLean with feedback about patients’ experiences during a time when their treatment is highly focused and time-limited. The survey gives patients the opportunity to evaluate their care and recognize clinicians and staff they feel were particularly helpful in their recovery. PoC is administered at discharge using either scannable forms or an iPad.

PoC is used in the hospital’s inpatient, residential, and partial hospital programs. Developed at McLean, the survey plays a central role in hospital-wide patient care improvement.

MHSE coordinates the data collection and quarterly reporting for all McLean inpatient, residential, and partial programs. The PoC open-ended questions are analyzed by SPSS Text Analytics software.

Critical and urgent patient feedback comments are handled by McLean’s chief quality officer. Common themes in comments include staff, treatment, food, aftercare, and facilities. Based on patient feedback, McLean has initiated many quality improvement efforts to improve patient care.

Behavior and Symptom Identification Scale (BASIS-24)

BASIS-24 was developed at McLean as an outcome assessment tool for adult mental health patients. It is used across all McLean inpatient, residential, and partial programs.

This patient self-report survey consists of 24 standardized items. The patient recalls behaviors and symptoms over the past week. Items are scored 0-4, where items rate either level of difficulty or frequency of experiences. BASIS-24 is administered at admission and discharge using scannable forms or an iPad.

Hospital-Based Inpatient Psychiatric Services (HBIPS)

The Joint Commission ORYX® Psychiatric Core Measures include seven core performance indicators required to meet accreditation requirements for psychiatric hospitals. McLean participated in The Joint Commission pilot program that resulted in this survey.

Data collected at McLean is transmitted to The Joint Commission (TJC) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on a quarterly and annual basis. With the help of MHSE, hospital-wide efforts have significantly improved, including documentation of patient admission screening, patient discharge process, and justification of antipsychotic medications.

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Questionnaire

This annual hospital survey on Patient Safety Culture is a staff survey developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. McLean has been using this questionnaire since January 2010 and the results are reported to McLean Hospital senior administration.

Research Projects

The MHSE engages in research of the properties of BASIS-24® as well as collaborative research throughout McLean.

Validation of the BASIS-24 in the Adolescent Population

The eBASIS team consistently works to provide the latest cutting-edge tools. This goal has brought about the most recent project, the Adolescent Pilot Study of the BASIS-24®. The reliability, validity, and psychometric properties of the BASIS-24® are known to be strong when tested with adults ages 18 and older. Testing the BASIS-24® with adolescents will demonstrate if the tool is a valid measure of symptoms and functioning in that population.

Readmission Within 30 Days of Discharge

This study uses archival data to identify what factors—including illness severity, social support, and following up with aftercare—are associated with readmission. In addition to gathering archival data, data will also be collected from clinical staff based on their experiences of what factors are predictive of readmission.

BASIS-24 Community Norms and Clinical Benchmarks for Patient Care

While the BASIS-24 is widely used, no community normative data or clinical benchmark has been published at this point. This project provides clinical “cut” scores which may be used to help determine whether a patient is experiencing symptoms in the clinical or normal range. Benchmarks will be useful to clinicians to determine the severity of their patient’s illness in comparison to the overall population as well as to set treatment goals.

Gender Invariance of the BASIS-24 Factor Structure

The psychometric properties of the BASIS-24 have never been analyzed for validity and reliability across gender. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to assess the acceptability of the six-factor model and find evidence of functional and scalar equivalence to establish equivalence across gender.

National Benchmarks

To produce comparison reports that are accurate, MHSE regularly requests data from customers to contribute toward the comparison report. Benchmarks are produced for PoC-IP, PoC-OP, and BASIS-24.

Publications

BASIS-24 and PoC have both been the subject of research and have been used by other researchers as outcomes assessments in their studies. There are over 30 publications about BASIS-24 or using it as a measure, and 17 of these publications have contributions from members of MHSE.

Contact

Telephone support and technical assistance is provided from 9am to 5pm Eastern Standard Time, Monday-Friday.

Main Contact: Thomaskutty Idiculla, PhD, Director
Phone: 617.855.2424 or 617.855.2190
Email: Send email