When you walk into your doctor's office,
your doctor can't look at you and immediately know what you need.
There are some things that are going on inside your mind and your body that may not be evident.
Systematic screening is a way for practices to make sure that they are
identifying the full range of needs that patients have.
And some of those needs are often very hard to articulate.
A lot of patients when it comes to things like preventive screening,
a lot of patients will know when they need their colonoscopy or they
may not remember the exact date, but they may have some ideas about when they're due for their mammogram.
But when it comes to things like mental and behavioral health, those things are sometimes harder to talk about.
So when somebody's feeling sad, they may not articulate that.
But if it becomes part of standard practice that everybody gets asked about how they're feeling emotionally,
it becomes normalized and desensitized. But it also becomes routinized in the practice.
Practices are organizations that do things out of routine.
So if you can make something just a standard operating procedure,
something that a person does with every patient,
every time, then it's likely to not be forgotten and it's likely to get done.
And having tools that support that process can be really helpful.
So when the MA or the medical assistant takes you back to the
room, if they have a prompt that makes sure that they ask every
patient – maybe it's the PHQ-2, how they're feeling.
It's just like taking blood pressure on every patient.
They do it with everybody, and they typically don't forget to do it. That's the value of systematic screening.
You're really creating a routine for the practices so that things aren't
forgotten, but you're also making these behaviors absolutely normal.
They are expectations that patients have.
When I go to the doctor, I expect that they're going to ask me about
my state of mind just like they're going to take my blood pressure.
So now it becomes something that I can talk about with them and I feel
like they're not focusing on me because I'm somehow different or special.