Digital Pharma: Pfizer puts mental health diagnosis tools online
pharmafile | July 26, 2010 | News story | Medical Communications | Digital Pharma blog, Pfizer, depression, digital patients
Pfizer has put two widely used mental health assessment tools online for the public to use.
It aims to improve diagnosis and patient care by making the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) and General Anxiety Disorder questionnaire (GAD-7) freely available to download.
Pfizer’s chief medical officer Freda Lewis-Hall said: “By providing unrestricted access, Pfizer is encouraging broader usage of these important patient assessment aids, which we know will help many healthcare providers and their patients.
“We are listening to the needs of the mental health community and doing what we can to provide the tools needed to make the best possible healthcare decisions.”
PHQ is self-administered questionnaire used to measure depression-related symptoms. It’s employed as a standard measure of depression risk by the NHS and the US Department of Defence, and commonly used by clinicians and researchers.
Also a self-administered questionnaire, GAD-7 is used as a screening tool and severity measure for generalised anxiety disorder.
The PHQ and GAD-7 tests are available at phqscreeners.com, where they have been translated into nearly 80 languages, including traditional Chinese, Mandarin and Korean.
The site also includes comprehensive instructions on how to use the questionnaires, articles about them and a dedicated email contact.
The two questionnaires were developed by US researchers, with the aid of an educational grant from Pfizer, during the 1990s and the company says they can be freely reproduced, translated, displayed or distributed via its new website.
The tests have been available online, in less comprehensive forms, for some time. For example, the GAD-7 questionnaire can be accessed via Patient UK’s website and the PHQ questionnaire can be found at the University of Washington School of Nursing’s Stepping Up website.
Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog He can be contacted via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.
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