Harnessing the Power of Surveys in Addiction Recovery: The Pretaa Way
Part One
Introduction
Understanding the Role of Surveys
The Value of Surveys in Addiction Treatment
Surveys like BAM, GAD, PHQs, and URICA provide several key benefits:
- Unveiling Hidden Insights: Surveys can help uncover thoughts, feelings, and experiences that might not be evident during face-to-face therapy sessions. They offer a safe space for individuals to express their emotions and self-evaluate their progress, resulting in a more comprehensive understanding of their condition.
- Tracking Progress: These surveys are powerful tools to monitor a patient’s progression over time. They provide a means to quantify emotional and psychological changes, enabling both the patient and the clinician to visualize the recovery journey.
- Guiding Treatment Approaches: Survey results inform the course of therapy, indicating areas that require more focus, strategies that are working well, and when adjustments in the treatment plan might be needed.
- Promoting Patient Engagement: By involving patients in tracking their progress, these surveys can foster a greater sense of agency and engagement in the recovery process. This, in turn, can enhance motivation and commitment to the therapeutic journey.
Part Two
Simplified Survey Administration
Introducing the Pretaa Way: Simplifying Survey Administration
Despite the evident benefits of these surveys, their integration into treatment can often pose logistical challenges for clinicians. This is where Pretaa comes in.
Pretaa is an innovative outcome-based measurement platform designed to augment the addiction recovery treatment process, specifically focusing on combining the power of biometric data and outcome-based tracking using industry-standard surveys.
Pretaa has streamlined the process of survey administration. Clinicians no longer need to manage paper-based surveys or manually input data into a system. Our app houses these industry-standard surveys, enabling clinicians to administer them with just a few clicks. Moreover, patients can fill out the surveys at their own convenience, using the Pretaa app on their mobile devices, further easing the process.
Beyond simplifying the administration process, Pretaa also offers powerful scheduling features. Clinicians can define the schedule and frequency of surveys to suit the needs of individual patients, ensuring that they have the most recent and relevant data at their fingertips.
A Closer Look at the Core Surveys:
Integrating industry-standard surveys into the Pretaa platform is just one more way Pretaa is augmenting the current treatment process to deliver better, more personalized care. Here’s a closer look at the surveys, their value in addiction treatment, and when they can be utilized most effectively.
Brief Addiction Monitor (BAM)
The BAM is a 17-item questionnaire designed to track recovery progress and recognize early signs of potential relapse. The survey covers three key areas: substance use, risk factors for use, and protective factors against use. It can be administered quickly and frequently, making it ideal for continuous monitoring throughout a patient’s recovery journey.
The BAM is invaluable in addiction treatment, offering real-time insights into a patient’s behaviors and coping mechanisms. By tracking changes in these areas over time, clinicians can adapt the treatment plan to meet the patient’s evolving needs. BAM is typically most beneficial when used at regular intervals throughout the treatment process to monitor progress and identify any issues that may signal a potential relapse.
General Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7)
The GAD-7 is a seven-item questionnaire used to screen for the presence and severity of generalized anxiety disorder. It is a valuable tool in the field of addiction recovery because of the high co-occurrence rate of anxiety disorders and substance use disorders.
GAD-7 offers a simple and effective means to screen for anxiety disorders, facilitating early intervention and treatment. This survey is particularly helpful at the initial stages of addiction treatment, enabling clinicians to understand the patient’s anxiety levels. However, given the fluctuating nature of anxiety, it can be beneficial to administer GAD-7 throughout the treatment process to monitor any changes in the patient’s anxiety symptoms.
Patient Health Questionnaires (PHQs)
The PHQ is a family of self-administered tools for screening, diagnosing, monitoring, and measuring the severity of depression. The most commonly used version, PHQ-9, focuses specifically on the nine criteria upon which the diagnosis of DSM-IV depressive disorders is based.
The PHQs offer valuable insights into a patient’s mental health, helping to identify co-occurring depressive symptoms that may impact addiction treatment. They are crucial in the initial assessment phase of treatment to determine any underlying mental health conditions. However, similar to GAD-7, it’s beneficial to use PHQs throughout the treatment process to gauge the effectiveness of interventions for depression and make necessary adjustments to the treatment plan.
University of Rhode Island Change Assessment Scale (URICA)
URICA is a 32-item questionnaire designed to assess a patient’s readiness to change. The survey is based on Prochaska and DiClemente’s stages of change model and covers four stages: pre-contemplation, contemplation, action, and maintenance.
In addiction treatment, the URICA is instrumental in personalizing treatment strategies based on the patient’s readiness to change. Clinicians can use this tool at the outset of treatment to understand where patients are in their change journey and tailor the treatment approach accordingly. It can also be valuable to administer the URICA at different points in the treatment process to understand how the patient’s readiness to change evolves over time.
Part Three
Conclusion
Revolutionizing Treatment through Surveys with Pretaa
Each of these surveys offers unique insights into the patient’s mental and emotional health, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of their recovery journey. With Pretaa’s platform, clinicians have these powerful tools at their fingertips, ready to be deployed when they can offer the most value to their patients.
In essence, Pretaa is not just a tool that eases the burden of survey administration for clinicians. It’s a transformative approach that leverages the power of industry-standard surveys, combining them with real-time biometric data to provide a holistic view of a patient’s recovery journey.
Our app combines the art of human care and the precision of data, delivering a powerful solution that takes outcome measurement and addiction recovery treatment to the next level.
By making it easier for clinicians to utilize these important surveys, Pretaa enhances the quality of care and the effectiveness of treatment outcomes.