Under The Hood At Skyler Health: Using the Risk Stratification Dashboard
If you work with a Skyler Health counselor, at some point you’ll encounter a series of ‘health checks.’ These are formal surveys that ask you to reflect on things like your level of pain, your level of anxiety, or your overall well-being. Each survey is only a few questions long. They may seem simple, but they’re actually based on clinical data and essential for helping your counselor support you.
Let’s walk through how you might encounter these surveys and what their purpose is.
What You’ll See
When you first log in to Skyler Health’s member portal, you’ll see the window that allows you to chat with your primary counselor online, in real time. If your counselor is busy, the window will give you the option to talk to an on-call counselor for immediate support or to leave a message for your primary counselor for a callback later.
In the ‘health check’ window, you’ll see all the surveys you’ve been assigned to take, along with graphs showing your progress. You (and your counselor) can see at a glance if your anxiety is getting better or worse or how your pain levels have been changing week to week. Lucid Lane’s system will also create composite scores based on multiple health check surveys. These composite scores combine pain and other signals to give you a score for overall quality of life or overall mental health.
If you take one of these surveys and your responses show your condition is getting worse, the system will prompt you with a couple of options. You can either ask a counselor to call you right away, chat online right away, or inform your counselor so that you can discuss your results at your next regularly scheduled session. If you do ask for a call, our system will prompt one of the on-call counselors to call your phone right away. And if your scores on any of the surveys do get worse, one of our clinical staff will be able to prompt your counselor to check in with you more often or tweak your treatment plan to better meet your needs.
The Science Behind our Health Checks
The GAD-7
This generalized anxiety disorder survey examines your level of anxiety. You’ll be prompted to answer seven questions about how often over the past two weeks you’ve been bothered by worry, restlessness, irritability, and a few other symptoms. This survey was created by Robert L. Spitzer, MD, who worked as a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University for 49 years before retiring in 2010. The survey was studied in a clinical trial and found to be a reliable and effective way to screen for anxiety and assess how severe the anxiety is.
The PHQ-9
The Patient Health Questionnaire screens for symptoms of depression. You’ll be asked nine questions about your sleep, level of interest in typical activities, ability to concentrate, and other symptoms. This survey is based on the official criteria for diagnosing depression. Clinical trials have also found it to be a reliable and useful way to check for depression and assess its severity.
The PCS
The Pain Catastrophizing Scale goes beyond the simple pain scale you may have seen at a doctor’s office. People who catastrophize tend to assume the worst, so if you catastrophize about your pain, you may believe that it will never get better, feel helpless to do anything about your pain, or feel depressed. The underlying pain is real. But two people with similar injuries may have different experiences if one thinks about it all the time and feels unable to do anything about it, while another has a more positive outlook. This survey, too, has been clinically validated.
How We Use These Scales
Both you and your counselor can see the results of your health checks and how they’re changing over time. Based on your scores, our tech system makes some initial recommendations about how to proceed with your care. Your counselor and our doctors will then customize that plan for your specific needs, and give you a chance to weigh in.
Once you’re working with a counselor, your health check scores provide continuous feedback for your counselor. Your counselor can look at these scores and determine if you need to slow down your tapering plan, if you’re ready to speed up, if you need more support or a real-time check-in, and so on. The technology doesn’t drive your treatment — it provides data to support your counselor in making a plan, and you always have the ability to provide input.
Be sure to visit us at Skyler Health, where we empower people to prevent and stop anxiety, pain, medication, and substance abuse with professional, licensed, and vetted counselors that you can trust.
