The Heartlands HIV Service counselling team based at the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham, have become the first ‘pioneer’ therapists to pilot an electronic version of PSYCHLOPS.
PSYCHLOPS is a short one page mental health outcome measure and can be used during the course of any psychotherapeutic intervention. It promotes a patient-centred definition of therapy outcome. It is patient-generated and can be self-completed, and has questions on Problems, Function and Wellbeing. Patients are asked to describe their main Problem or Problems and how this affects them (Function). Responses to all questions are scored. PSYCHLOPS captures data before, during and after a course of therapy. Change can be measured throughout the process of therapy, whether or not therapy is completed.
The electronic version of PSYCHLOPS, or ePSYCHLOPS, was developed in collaboration with CORE-Net with IT development, Information Governance and data storage led by the CORE IMS team. The visual appearance of ePSYCHLOPS can be seen on the‘Versions’ tab of the PSYCHLOPS website. The beauty of ePSYCHLOPS is that all freetext responses on PSYCHLOPS will auto-complete in the During-Therapy and Post-Therapy versions, removing the need for transcribing the freetext. Scoring and change scores have also been automated and future versions will incorporate graphical displays of change scores. As a pioneer, the Heartlands team will be providing feedback that will help further enhance and improve future versions of ePSYCHLOPS ahead of its formal launch, expected at the end of 2018.