Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (CORE) - The CORE measures and system: Measuring, monitoring and managing quality evaluation in the psychological therapies

Abstract

The CORE (Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation) measures make up a battery of client-completed outcome measures derived from a 34-item parent measure—the CORE-OM—which taps the domains of subjective well-being, problems, functioning and risk. The measures share the common method fundamental to all outcome measures identified as patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) and which are a central plank in healthcare evaluation. The CORE measures lie at the heart of the broader CORE System that comprises practitioner-completed forms capturing information relating to pre-therapy variables, treatment delivery and post-therapy impacts. This CORE System, in its paper form, is supported by optional software support systems using personal computer (PC) and the Internet (Net) formats (i.e. CORE PC and CORE Net) which offer analysis, reporting, benchmarking, performance development and clinical decision aids. This combination of measurement and monitoring tools has become widely used in the UK for evaluating the outcomes of psychological therapies and also the quality of service delivery (e.g. waiting times). The purpose of this chapter is to set out the development, implementation and yield of the CORE System components with specific reference to routine practice settings. We have framed the content of this chapter under three main headings that are consistent with quality evaluation: measurement, monitoring and management. These components laid the foundations for the first generation of quality evaluation using CORE and provide the basis for development of the second generation of quality evaluation that concludes this chapter. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)(chapter)