Public and private entities are rapidly developing new methods for measuring and reviewing psychiatric care-methods that may not always reflect good research into the perspective of clinicians. Mental health providers and their patients are being held to new "criteria" in determinations of access to services. A wide range of clinical and policy issues are affected by the selection and application of psychiatric measures: eligibility determinations, outcomes assessment, pricing, and risk adjustment, as well as activities related to quality assurance and utilization review. The Handbook of Psychiatric Measures responds to these challenges.

The handbook provides clinicians working in mental health or primary care settings with a compendium of the available rating scales, tests, and measures that may be useful for caring for patients with mental illnesses. In addition, it provides guidance to clinicians, policy makers, and planners on how to better understand and properly use clinical measures to assess performance of individual providers or groups of providers in health care delivery systems.

In selecting, applying, and interpreting a measure, clinicians must be knowledgeable about the nuances of measurement, including not only the psychometric properties of an instrument (e.g., its reliability or validity), but, even more importantly, the factors that affect the clinical utility of the measure. This handbook supplies that knowledge, with detailed information about components, reliability, validity, and clinical utility, including strengths and weaknesses, for each measure included.

Accompanying this handbook is a CD-ROM that includes complete copies of 108 measures discussed in the handbook-over 900 pages of measures. The CD-ROM also includes the complete, unabridged text of the Handbook of Psychiatric Measures, in fully searchable form. The electronic version is replete with links and cross-references, including links from the text of the handbook to the actual measures being discussed.