Announcing Formsort's mental health assessment templates

Formsort is rolling out a series of templates that enable our customers to launch flows at the click of a button. Our first templates are for the most common mental health intake assessments: PHQ-9, PHQ-4, and GAD-7. These templates include clinically validated questions and scoring frameworks designed to screen for the presence of depressive and anxiety disorders. 

Why we started with mental health intake templates

Mental health disorders can be comorbid with other illnesses and can be aggravated by stressful or traumatic events. The COVID-19 pandemic was a perfect storm that led to spikes in depression and anxiety rates. According to the CDC, from August 2020 to February 2021 alone, the percentage of adults with recent symptoms of anxiety or a depressive disorder increased by 15%, from 36.4% to 41.5% (source). In order to keep up with the increased demand for mental healthcare services, practitioners need the right digital tools to efficiently analyze and track symptoms amongst patients. 

Traditionally, these forms have been paper-and-pencil assessments filled out in busy waiting rooms, or answered face to face with a care provider. Both of these methods have their drawbacks: paper forms can be manually intensive to process, while face-to-face check-ins may suffer from reporting bias due to patients withholding information about their symptoms.

Digital assessment flows like Formsort’s help ease the administrative burden of mental health assessments, and make it easier to monitor patients’ symptoms over time.

Assessment templates that meet industry standards

The patient health questionnaire (PHQ) is a self-administered version of the Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders (PRIME-MD) diagnostic instrument for common mental health illnesses originally developed in the 1990s. It incorporates DSM-IV depression criteria with other leading major depressive symptoms. The PHQ-9 is a 9-item questionnaire for depressive disorders, the PHQ-4 is a 4-item questionnaire for anxiety and depression, and the GAD-7 is a 7-item questionnaire for anxiety.  

These questionnaires were a great place for us to start our template products. Why? 

1. Questions are standard throughout the medical industry, so a wide range of health care providers can use them. 
2. Building this flow from scratch can be tedious and time-consuming to do yourself. You'll need to configure the flow design and build the complex calculation logic to score respondents appropriately. A ready-to-use template includes questions, a design theme and calculation logic out of the box, saving you time and money.
3. Since assessment questions are standardized, your team can focus your time on customizing the style to ensure the flow aligns with your brand’s design.

Here’s what one of our customers, Allara Health, has to say about our templates:

How do Formsort’s mental health intake templates work?

Each of the 3 templates is designed as a 1-page questionnaire. Keeping it to 1 page makes it easy for responders to complete the flow, but you can choose to break out the questions across multiple pages. 

Each of the 3 templates have 2 versions: one that displays answer choices with sliders, and one that displays answer choices with buttons. Teams can choose the style that best fits their desired user experience. In general we are seeing companies shift to buttons over sliders, but the sliders’ left to right motion is intuitive and in-line with the design of paper assessment forms. Below we share a preview of each style.

Slider

Buttons

By default, answer choices for each question are scored on a 0-3 scale, aligning with standard scoring mechanisms for PHQs and GAD-7. You can choose to customize the answer values, but we recommend sticking to the default so your results can be analyzed and compared to national statistics.

Once responders complete the questionnaire, the template generates an assessment score in real-time based on their responses. The assessment score is a preset calculated variable that aggregates scores of individual questions into a composite score aligned to a clinically validated scoring framework. This score helps practitioners understand the severity of a patient’s symptoms over time. 

Looking for more design inspiration? 

We recently launched Fineflows, a pattern library featuring live flows for the most common use cases, like mental health intake templates. You can use this free gallery as inspiration when designing your next flow. Here's a mental health assessment flow by Hims that we like:

Ready to explore our templates?

If you’re interested in learning more about our templates and how to get started, talk to our team.