Why TOP is Better
If you want good outcomes, start with good data.
Only TOP does all this
Normed to US General Population
The scientific accuracy and practical usefulness of TOP is exceptional because TOP scores are normed against the US general population. Most other tools just offer a comparison of the patient with other behavioral health patients. TOP goes much further with built-in general population norms (TOP’s Z-score reporting system indicates how many standard deviations a patient is from the US average for each domain).
TOP’s general population comparisons provide health professionals with an absolute measure of patient well-being, allowing for better treatment planning and referral guidance. TOP compares patients to the general population on a wide range of symptoms and functional domains, measuring each into the healthy, strength-based aspect of the dimension and into the farthest reaches of disturbance.
TOP answers the essential question: “Just how disturbed or healthy are my patients?”
TOP measures the severity of seriously ill patients.
TOP measures the full range of patient behavioral health problems up to 30 standard deviations above normal. Most other tools only measure up to 3 standard deviations. Although the severity of some psychological disorders have maximums of 6–8 standard deviations from normal, the severity of many disorders goes as high as 20–30 standard deviations. As a result, other behavioral health assessment tools categorize severely ill patients with those who are only moderately ill. This is an issue that affects 65% of patients—the portion of behavioral health patients who have one or more very serious problems above three standard deviations. Outcome Referrals measures this group of seriously ill patients that others miss because of the ceiling effect in their tools.
Other Tools Have Significant “Ceiling Effect”
Incorrect Patient Assessment
The severity of the most intense psychological issues is dramatically understated by standard tools.
Patient Deterioration Overlooked
When the condition of a seriously ill behavioral health patient gets worse, that deterioration is not recorded.
Clinician Success not Recognized
Clinician success with severely ill patients is often not recognized because many significant improvements in well-being go undetected.
TOP Predicts…
You “hire” an outcome tool to tell you something you don’t already know. We’ve spent more than 30 years doing exactly that. TOP can predict your client’s future status, predict which therapists are best matched to exceed this predicted outcome, alert you to pending emergencies (like hospitalizations) and much more. Behind TOP is the world’s largest database of behavioral outcomes which is used for these big data predictions. No other tool is better risk-adjusted and TOP explains more outcome variance than any other published tool results by a factor of ten.
We are engaged in the first randomized clinical trial in any field of medicine that uses outcome data to make scientific referrals that is expected to double or even quadruple the outcomes of standard care by simply matching a therapist’s strengths to each client’s primary problems.
TOP is multi-dimensional.
TOP provides precise assessment scores for 12 behavioral health and well-being domains, as well as information about stress and lifestyle issues. Standard behavioral assessment tools only provide a measure of general distress rather than a calibrated measure of domain-specific problem severity. TOP domains have been derived empirically and confirmed in large factor analytic studies, documenting exceptional construct validity.
TOP is the most accurate and sensitive outcome measurement instrument on the market today.
TOP can document statistically significant change in 96% of patients, a figure that is unparalleled. The closest competitive tool only measures statistically significant change in 30% of patients. TOP is also the only behavioral health outcome measurement tool that has excellent construct, content, concurrent and predictive validity. These exemplary validation statistics are central to TOP’s success.