The balanced scorecard approach applied to diagnosis and treatment evidence with representative measures in each quadrant?

The traditional bottom line- the most important measure of a company's success- is profit and loss. It's nice and simple but as civilisation advanced so moved the goal posts of success.

The triple bottom line is one principle which redefines the bottom line to be more than money alone. For the life of me I can't remember the other bits of the triple bottom line. I think one might be corporate citizenship. Just Google it if you're interested.

A leap ahead in measurement is the balanced scorecard approach published by I think Kaplan and Norton in the early nineties. It uses multiple weighted measures aggregated across a number of umbrella domains (usually 4).

It aims to quantify things which are hard or complex to representatively measure. I came across it in use in children's social care performance management. It's obviously a difficult and complex thing to measure.

(Bugger. I've realised how complicated this idea is going to be. I'm also concerned this may be a bad thought process, ie it will end with a bad result. Will continue anywAy of course.)

I can think of three domains: symptoms, social outcomes and employment outcomes/ history plus education? . There's undoubtedly more.

The balanced scorecard could be used for everyone. As such, current psychiatric diagnosis wouldn't apply. Mental illness diagnosis would be based on a threshold of one or more measures and/ or domains. (There's so much more to this bit but I'm just trying to make a thumbnail sketch of the idea. )

The definition of this threshold represents the illness cut off instead of the current operational approach. No specific label is required but it's implicit in the threshold trigger pattern.

The trigger pattern is what is used to select the most effective treatment. The proof of the treatment is solving the problem of this more complex and accurate description of mental illness. It doesn't rely on symptoms like the current system. It looks at outcomes, disability and distress as well as symptoms. The weighting of the significance of the measures and domains is a fine art developed over time but such an approach can yield glorious results compared to the simplistic psychiatric system.

There's more to this idea. Much more. But I think I've sketched enough for now,

- sent from my smartphone