STAT Depression Screening PHQ-9

What objective criteria do you use to diagnose depression and determine the severity? Do you document any improvement on subsequent visits?"

Quickly review and score the PHQ-9 on your device. The PHQ-9 is the nine item depression scale of the Patient Health Questionnaire. The PHQ-9 is a powerful educational tool for reviewing the guidelines for diagnosing depression as well as selecting and monitoring treatment.

There are two components of the PHQ-9:

• Assessing symptoms and functional impairment to make a tentative depression diagnosis, and
• Deriving a severity score to help select and monitor treatment

The PHQ-9 is based directly on the diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Fourth Edition (DSM-IV).