QPASS in The News

This article recently appeared on HealthyRockford.com, a website of the Rockford Register Starin Rockford, Illinois, where QPASS is based.

Local counselor offers new patient assessment tool

By Mike DeDoncker
Last update Jul 16, 2008 @ 10:49 AM
HealthyRockford.com


Sometimes, distaste can be the mother of invention.

That was partly the case in 1997 when Scott Lownsdale, a Rockford-based licensed clinical professional counselor, chose a doctoral dissertation topic that turned into a four-year research project with another six years of real-world testing. The result is the Quick Psycho-Affective Symptoms Scan (Qpass), a self-report psychological assessment test launched in 2007 and aimed at making the time mental-health professionals spend with patients more effective and making it easier to document that effectiveness to the insurance industry.

“One reason I developed the test is because I don’t like doing testing,” Lownsdale said. “I like doing therapy, so if it catches on I hope more effective therapy is done as what’s happening with my practice.

“I believe I’m having more time for therapy and I’m doing more effective therapy because of accurate testing being done in a very short period of time.”

The Qpass is a 105-question test that measures a patient’s depression, anxiety and anger which Lownsdale said “are the emotional underpinnings of almost all psychiatric problems.” He said the test typically takes about 10 minutes for the patient to complete and equated it to collecting a patient’s “psychological vital signs” before they see the doctor.

“When I showed it to my doctoral committee, we saw the potential for this test to be useful for almost all mental-health professionals,” Lownsdale said. “I spent extra time on the dissertation rather than just getting the dissertation done. I spent, perhaps, four years and enlisted the help of about 50 mental-health professionals across the country so it became a major research project using almost 500 mental-health patients who were patients of these mental-health professionals.”

Lownsdale said other testing materials are more expensive and lengthy.

“The gold standards are the Beck inventories for depression and anxiety and the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory,” he said. “They’re very expensive and they take a lot of time. This instrument, we found through our research, can measure depression, anxiety and anger just as well if not better than all three of those major tests.”

Lownsdale said research on Qpass has shown that it can also measure 21 other indicators of emotional distress including phobic avoidance, obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychosis, suicide risk and risk for violence.

“These things were nice surprises,” he said. “There are little subscales that we found we could measure, although that was not the intention.”

The written Qpass test can be scored in three to 10 minutes, Lownsdale said, but must be interpreted by a mental-health professional with at least a master’s degree.

An online version can be scored instantly, he said.

“It collects an enormous amount of information in a very short time,” Lownsdale said, “and, when the therapist quickly scans the symptoms, they can zero in on a particular item.”

Lownsdale said a battery of tests can cost as much as $6 to $10. The paper version of Qpass goes for 69 cents.

“It’s so inexpensive that a lot of therapists are not even charging the insurance companies,” he said. “Our whole goal is to get mental health assessed. It’s not being assessed these days by therapists because of expensive instruments and you have to fill out insurance papers to get a simple test taken care of. It’s nonsense.”

Lownsdale said the testing costs and insurance paperwork are keeping testing from being performed “as much as it used to be and also not as much as it should be done.”

Lownsdale said he doesn’t envision himself as a testing expert “and if I ever did workshops on this for other therapists it would just be to teach them how to use this in their practices. That would give me tremendous satisfaction.”

Quick facts about Qpass
What: A 105-question self-report measure of the severity of depression, anxiety and anger that can be completed by a patient in 10 minutes.
Author: Scott Lownsdale, licensed clinical professional counselor
Cost: 69 cents per test
Where: Online at Qpasslive.com or Heartland Publishing, 3830 16th Ave., Rockford, IL 61108
Call: 815-229-8750


Mike DeDoncker is the editor of HealthyRockford.com. He can be reached at 815-987-1382 or mdedoncker@rrstar.com.