On behalf of the Psychological Services (Division 18) editorial team:

Call for Papers: Measurement-Based Care and Psychological Assessment in Mental Health Services

Submission Deadline:  October 15, 2018

The editorial staff at APA Division 18’s journal, Psychological Services, is inviting manuscripts for a special issue on measurement based care and psychological assessment in mental health services. Our guest editors for this special package include Drs. Sandra Resnick, Mary Oehlert, and Rani Hoff.

Measurement-based care is defined as the use of brief, psychometrically sound patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) repeated over time to track important clinical outcomes and used as a critical piece of information in shared decision making and ongoing treatment planning and to tailor mental health treatments to individual needs. Measurement-based care improves clinical outcomes by helping providers track individual progress in treatment, and helps to improve outcomes by identifying individuals who may not be improving or who are deteriorating, providing a signal to modify the treatment approach. Measures can also be aggregated to the provider or program level as part of routine outcomes monitoring. Measurement in mental health is beginning to become more wide spread with new requirements for measurement based care and outcome reporting by Joint Commission and the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA).

Psychological Assessment, more broadly, includes the use of standardized psychological instruments to inform diagnosis and treatment in addition to identifying individual strengths and weaknesses. Maximizing knowledge of normative, population specific data intrinsic within psychological instruments, and subsequent response biases, is crucial in the application of results to measurement-based care. However, while using psychometrically sound measures is an important part of measurement based care, there are significant differences between the practice of psychological assessment and measurement based care. The use of psychological assessments requires very specific training for administration, interpretation and report writing, and assessments are often protected from the public in order to preserve test integrity. Measures adopted for measurement based care are usually in the public domain, are face valid, and often require minimal training to administer and use well; most may be used for tracking symptoms independent of professional intervention.

This special issue seeks manuscripts broadly related to measurement-based care in mental health and psychological assessment with a focus on expanding our current knowledge base in such areas as:

  • shared decision-making as a component of measurement-based care
  • expansion of normative knowledge base of standardized instruments through encompassing “big data” analysis
  • studies of implementation of measurement-based care in mental health systems
  • studies on the barriers to measurement based care, and innovative solutions
  • theoretical and/or empirical papers that extend the rationale and support for measurement-based care in mental health
  • studies of how best to present results from measurement-based care and/or psychological assessment to service recipients to maximize understanding
  • adaptation of existing psychological assessments or creation of new PROMs for measurement-based care
  • using “big data” to identify and validate group and sub-group response patterns with standardized instruments that may change over time.
  • studies of how prediction models can be utilized within a shared-decision making process to increase probability of improved treatment outcomes.

APA Division 18 (for psychologists in public service) welcomes manuscripts related to these areas including but not limited to the following domains:

  • work being conducted within police and public safety settings
  • work being conducted in criminal justice settings including courts, prisons and prison reentry programs
  • work being conducted in educational systems at all levels
  • work being conducted in hospitals and community clinics
  • work being conducted for the Indian Health Service and
  • work being conducted in the Department of Veterans Affairs

The deadline for receipt of papers for this special section is October 15, 2018

Please follow the Instructions to Authors information located on the Psychological Services homepage. Manuscripts must be submitted electronically through the Manuscript Submission Web Portal.

Please specify in your cover letter that the submission is intended for the special section on Measurement-Based Care and Psychological Assessment in Mental Health Services and address your letter to Dr. Lisa Kearney, Associate Editor.

All papers submitted will be initially screened by the editorial board and then sent out for blind peer review, if evaluated as appropriate for the journal.

For further questions related to this special section, please contact Dr. Kearney.