POLARIS-YOUTH
Helping children and adolescents use strengths to build resilience and improve mental health.

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Polaris-Youth is an outcomes management system designed to support behavioral health treatment for children and adolescents. By incorporating the perspectives of the youth and all those involved in his or her care--from the clinician to the parent/caregiver--the system provides a comprehensive basis for improved treatment planning and monitoring.

✔ Psychometrically sound measures, including the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) scale. Click here to view the measures included in Polaris-Youth.

✔ Easily integrated into the normal treatment process--respondent and administrative burden is minimal.

✔ Provides information to document medical necessity for managed care, and ongoing feedback for individual and program treatment evaluation.

✔ Incorporates data on safety, the environment, and current and past trauma.

✔ Is appropriate for a variety of settings, including wraparound and residential care.

✔ Detects inauthentic/inconsistent responding

✔ HIPAA compliant

✔ CANS questionnaires completed by clinicians incorporate behavioral health risk content to support better matching of needs to services.

✔ Clinician assessment contains additional variables designed to improve clinical usefulness and/or prediction of optimal service mix.

✔ Provides risk adjustment and decision support for service utilization review and clinical supervision.

The Story Behind Polaris-Youth

One in ten children and adolescents suffer from a mental illness severe enough to cause some level of impairment, and in any given year, only one in five of these children are properly diagnosed or receive the appropriate care, according to the 1997 Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health. In response to this disturbing evidence, the Polaris development team conceived of Polaris-Youth.

Their goal: Design a system that would improve the behavioral health outcomes of mentally ill children and adolescents by providing clinical decision support throughout the treatment process.

Polaris-Youth is designed to provide full outcomes management and clinical decision support capabilities. Content is periodically updated based on the latest child and youth development research. Strength-based paradigms are included to emphasize that despite an adolescent’s abuse or negative life choices, he or she often has strengths and can be taught skills to help them overcome adversity, build supportive relationships in the community and resist behaviors that may be related to gang involvement, drug abuse or teen pregnancy.

Polaris-Youth Scales

The system’s mental health assessment screens for:

A variety of common behavioral disorders including:

• Conduct Disorder
• ADHD
• Depression
• Anxiety

Strength Based Domains:

• Resiliency
• Quality of the parent-child relationship
• Community involvement
• School functioning

The inclusion of strength-based paradigms is based on the premise that despite abuse or negative life choices, a youth often has strengths and can be taught skills to overcome adversity, build supportive relationships in the community and resist behaviors that may be related to gang involvement, drug abuse or teen pregnancy.

Additional benchmarks include:

• The lifetime history of the adolescent’s psychological problems
• Current psychological problems
• Ratings of motivation for treatment
• Cooperation of child/parent to treatment
• Critical signs (e.g., suicidal ideation, danger to self or others)
• Readiness to terminate treatment
• Engagement and improvement of adolescent in treatment

Learn more about the stakeholder benefits of Polaris-Youth.

Not sure whether you need Polaris-CW or Polaris-Youth? Click here to learn more about the differences.

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