Clinicians

“I'll be damned if I'm going to pull together yet another set of scales from five different places, send it out, nag them to complete it, squint at another fuzzy, lopsided cell phone pic, and then score them all by hand! And I don't care how useful you think it is... we're not using that one with 200+ reverse-scored questions and nested subscales ever again!”

Hi, I'm Mark. Previously, I had a lengthy career as a commercial and open source software developer. But, for the last few years, I've been helping my wife Pauline with the admin/business side of her bustling private psychiatry practice in Victoria, BC.

As geeks tend to do, I've cobbled together various tools to automate the drudgery of her largely paper-chart-based practice (e.g., prescriptions, labs, reports).

But dealing with scales was still a PITA, beyond hand-filled PHQ9/GAD7-type things. Especially when we wanted several done at once, as we usually did.

It's not like there aren't tons of websites where you can fill out scales and have them scored, many reasonably user-friendly. But the whole process of getting patients to use them, getting the results back, and integrating them into charts was clunky. They just didn't fit into our workflow. And forget about doing that with multiple scales at once.

Seeing all the hand-filled and scanned paper copies or shitty EMR eForm versions that got sent with referrals, it didn't look like we were alone in that.

Understanding the different ways self-report scales are used in practice, the technology stumbling blocks for patients, and the pain points on our end, I created MHScales. We've been using it with Pauline's patients since Jan/2022, improving the design along the way based on actual use.

It's taken all the friction and hassles out of using scales. Now:

• We use them much more often and collect better data in far less time.
• Patients love clicking a link on their phones vs. messing around with PDFs.
• Most importantly, it's become a natural part of our everyday workflow, on par with labs.

As of early 2024, ~200 of her patients have completed ~500 sets of scales, equating to ~1700 individual scales. As well, ~100 clinicians from around the world have stumbled upon and registered on the site, and many more clinicians and patients have used it anonymously without registering. To date, ~10,000 scales have been completed.

This isn't exactly rocket science or a cure for cancer. But getting the workflow right makes a difference. I'd encourage you to give it a try. While still a work-in-progress, I hope that MHScales makes things smoother in your practice as it has for us.

I'd love to hear what you think. Let me know how I can make this better for everyone.