What Polaris-Youth Measures

Polaris-Youth compiles the perspectives of all those involved in the treatment process, the adolescent, clinician, and parent/caregiver, when assessing an adolescent. It, thereby, affords a comprehensive basis for treatment planning and monitoring.

Polaris-Youth screens for a variety of common behavioral disorders and behaviors including:

• Conduct Disorder
• ADHD
• Depression
• Anxiety

Along with these disorders and the strength-based domains described above, the system also measures:

• 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

Clinician Questionnaire

Polaris-Youth includes a clinician questionnaire designed for utilization review, clinical supervision, and documentation of clinical progress from the clinician’s perspective. The clinician may provide DSM codes, case severity indicators, and an assessment of the adolescent’s motivation for treatment, severity of symptoms and functional disability, progress, and prognosis.

Clinician items were designed to provide risk adjustment and decision support for service utilization review and clinical supervision. Items were adapted from Lyon’s Severity and Acuity Psychiatric Illness Scales. These items have been widely used and have proven useful for decision making for residential treatment (11) and for quality improvement in crisis assessment services (10; 7).

Clinician items facilitate utilization review. The clinician rates each item on a 4-point scale: “1” indicates no need for action; “2” indicates a need for watchful waiting to see whether action is warranted; “3” indicates a need for actions; and “4” indicates the need for either immediate or intensive action. Clinicians provide severity ratings at intake for risk factors (e.g., suicide risk, psychosis, abuse) important to utilization review, assessment of service needs and for “case mix” adjustment of program outcomes data. Acuity data is collected throughout treatment, assessing problems (e.g., level of activity, disobedience, etc.) that are likely to change as a result of treatment.