What is it about?
Psychiatric urgent care is fast-paced and high-acuity. Clinicians must assess safety and make decisions quickly. In that setting, it can be difficult to consistently capture patients’ own perspectives about their symptoms and functioning. Patient-reported outcome questionnaires are brief, structured tools that patients complete electronically by selecting response options. They assess symptoms and daily functioning and generate standardized quantitative scores, such as T-scores, that can be compared across individuals and against national reference populations. In this paper, we describe what we actually did to bring electronic patient-reported outcome questionnaires into two psychiatric urgent care clinics in Maryland. This is a real-world account of how our clinical, administrative, and digital teams worked together to integrate structured patient-reported data into routine care. We analyzed more than 22,000 urgent care episodes between 2021 and 2023 to evaluate patient participation, clinician use of results, and the factors that influenced success. ver time, questionnaire completion rose steadily, reaching a monthly high of 73 percent. Clinician use of questionnaire data also increased substantially. We also identified disparities in participation across demographic and diagnostic groups. Recognizing these gaps allows targeted improvement and supports more equitable care. In short, this paper tells the story of how structured information about symptoms and functioning can function in real-world psychiatric urgent care.Mental health–related urgent visits are increasing, and health systems are under pressure to demonstrate quality and equity. Yet psychiatric urgent care has rarely been shown to successfully incorporate structured patient-reported questionnaires at scale.
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Why is it important?
Mental health–related urgent visits are increasing, and health systems are under pressure to demonstrate quality and equity. Yet psychiatric urgent care has rarely been shown to successfully incorporate structured patient-reported questionnaires at scale. To our knowledge, this is the largest reported effort of its kind in psychiatric urgent care. What makes this work distinctive is its practical focus: integrating questionnaires into the electronic medical record within minutes, offering multilingual and text-based access, and using continuous stakeholder meetings to refine workflow. This study shows that structured patient-reported data about symptoms and functioning can be sustainably integrated into even high-acuity environments — and provides a blueprint for other institutions.
Perspectives
For me, this work represents the direction psychiatry must move. We are trained to listen carefully and understand our patients’ stories. That will always matter. But structured patient-reported questionnaires add a powerful layer. They give patients a clear, intentional space to reflect on their symptoms and functioning in a consistent way. With just a few taps, their experience becomes visible in a new dimension. The information is still personal and subjective — but now it has shape. It helps us spot patterns. It highlights severity. It sometimes brings forward concerns that might stay hidden in conversation alone. It gives both patient and clinician something concrete to look at together. Decades of research show that when structured measurement is integrated into care, decisions improve and outcomes improve. That matters. What excites me most is that we made this work in psychiatric urgent care — one of the most intense settings in mental health. This is not theory. It is real-world practice. I believe psychiatry has to be both - deeply compassionate and thoughtfully structured - at the same time. Bringing patient-reported data about symptoms and functioning into routine care is one step toward that future.
Robert Schloesser
Sheppard Pratt Health System
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Implementing Electronic Patient-Reported Outcome Measures in Psychiatric Urgent Care, Psychiatric Services, February 2026, American Psychiatric Association,
DOI: 10.1176/appi.ps.20250325.
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