Polaris Health Directions Inc.POLARIS-CD (CHEMICAL DEPENDENCY)
Helping adults with drug and alcohol addiction maintain recovery
THE STORY BEHIND THE PRODUCT
The Polaris team set out to design measures that would explicitly support clinical decision making and quality improvement for substance abuse treatment programs. This is the hallmark of an effective outcomes management system, and is what sets Polaris-CD apart from other systems.
Polaris-CD was built to provide data to help treatment providers answer three key questions:
✔ What services are most cost-effective for this patient?
✔ Is his/her treatment “working”; i.e., is the patient’s progress satisfactory?
✔ Is this person at high risk for dropout or relapse, and, if so, how can he/she be helped to maintain recovery?
Polaris-CD has an exceptionally strong research foundation, including a 5-year NIDA-sponsored research program conducted jointly by Polaris staff and the Treatment Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. The research team found that patients who receive treatment directed towards their specific problems experienced significantly more positive outcomes than similar patients, treated in the same programs by the same therapists, who were not matched to services. The "matching" procedure developed under this research has been incorporated into Polaris CD.
Along with matching patient to services, Polaris-CD enables providers to concurrently monitor a patient's progress during treatment. The clinically actionable data the system produces helps providers identify persons who should be monitored post-treatment, and introduces the practice as a routine component of the treatment process as a way to improve compliance with post-discharge monitoring procedures.
Further benefits of Polaris-CD:
✔ The assessments include more than a dozen questions that research has found to be predictive of dropout or relapse. This information can be used clinically to assess the need for interventions that are designed to reduce negative outcomes, such as Motivation Enhancement Therapy or Relapse Prevention.
✔ Scientifically sound and the only system of its kind with National Institute of Drug and Alcohol (NIDA) funding
✔ Collects data in multiple life areas that specifically focus on possible obstacles to recovery to predict the risk of relapse and better manage the course of treatment
✔ Documents program effectiveness and outcomes for payers and accreditation organizations
✔ Includes the composite scales from the "gold standard" Addiction Severity Index (ASI), which produces scores indicating the severity of the patient’s problems relating to drug and alcohol use, family/social, psychological, medical, and employment.
✔ The update instrument includes questions about patient satisfaction, the number of services the patient has received in relation to various problem areas during the past two weeks, and attitudes relating to relapse avoidance.
✔ Provides robust assessment of depression and anxiety for patients that screen positive for those conditions.
REPORTS
Two types of reports are produced by Polaris-CD: individual patient reports and aggregate, program-level reports.
Patient reports are printed after every Polaris-CD administration. The Intake report is formatted to present information relating to each of the following clinical issues:
- Reliability of the information presented
- Critical clinical issues (e.g., suicidality)
- Reasons for seeking treatment
- Level of risk for dropout
- Areas of concern
- Severity of problems in each area
- Readiness to change
- Relapse risk factors
- Self-efficacy
The Update report is also formatted to address issues of patient change during treatment:
- Reliability of the information presented
- Critical clinical issues
- Change in areas of concern
- Change in perceived need for treatment
- Change in problem severity
- Relationship of services received to problem areas
The Intake and Update reports are printed automatically after each assessment. Polaris-CD also provides, at staff request, a “Q and A” report listing all questions on the assessment along with the patient’s response to each.
Aggregate reports can be produced for any interval of treatment. The Intake (aggregate) report presents summary data collected on the Intake assessment for all patients that completed it during the specified interval. The Patient Progress report shows various indicators of patient improvement for all patients that completed both an Intake and an Update assessment during the interval. The indicators are typically change scores based upon the difference between the Intake and most recent Update data available for each patient.
Polaris-CD reports have been found to be exceptionally useful for cross-program comparisons of patient satisfaction and (severity-adjusted) clinical outcomes.
Polaris-CD also includes an optional counselor questionnaire designed for programs that intend to use the system for utilization review, clinical supervision, or to improve the ability to predict a patient’s response to treatment. The form requires only five minutes to complete at intake; update questionnaires take about two minutes. The counselor may provide DSM codes, case severity indicators, and assess the patient’s motivation for treatment, severity of symptoms and functional disability, progress, and prognosis.
Learn more about the design and key features of the Polaris-CD.
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