Supporting Primary Care in Diagnosis and Choice of Treatment for Patients With Psychosocial Symptoms: SGEPsyScan. (SGE-PsyScan)

Maastricht University Medical Centre (MUMC)

Status: Completed

Conditions: Mental Disorders

Treatments: Other: SGE-PsyScan

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01971307

NL44597.068.13/ METC 13-3-034

Details and patient eligibility

About

Although effective treatments for psychosocial symptoms and disorders are available, patients frequently do not receive the most appropriate and effective treatment for their symptoms because of inappropriate and unstructured diagnostics of psychosocial symptoms in general practice. The hypothesis is that by using the intervention SGE-PsyScan the clinical symptoms of patients can be assessed more uniformly and earlier as opposed to the GPs' assessment in usual care. As a result, patients are supposed to start earlier with a treatment that fits the type and severity of their symptoms better.

The patients will be randomly assigned to either receive the SGE-PsyScan or usual care.

Enrollment: 336 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Patients with (suspected) psychosocial symptoms
• Aged 18 years or older and capacitated
• Adequate understanding of Dutch language
• Able to perform SGE-PsyScan at home, individually

Exclusion criteria

• Clear and treatable somatic causes of symptoms
• Acute distress/danger
• No written informed consent

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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336 participants in 2 patient groups

SGE-PsyScan

Experimental group

Description:

The SGE-PsyScan is an internet application to which the General Practitioner (GP) refers the patient, which includes the distress screener, the 4-Dimensional Symptom Questionnaire (4DSQ) and a series of additional questions for differentiating between stress, depressive, anxious and somatization symptoms. Based on the 4DSQ patients and GPs receive advices for possible treatments.

Treatment:

Other: SGE-PsyScan

Usual care

No Intervention group

Description:

Usual care for persons with psychosocial symptoms and disorders in Dutch primary care includes all usual care procedures; preventive, screening, diagnostic, (non-)pharmacological or therapeutic procedures which are routinely used in everyday care.