The P-CIS Questionnaire module makes data useful and accessible, to support treatment and intervention planning for staff and supervisors. P-CIS can be used with nearly any assessment in human services practice.

The Questionnaire module in P-CIS gives you insights at a glance from a graph of scores over time, to status icons, to color coded scores.

Choose a Questionnaire

The first thing you will see under the questionnaire tab is a summary dashboard of all questionnaires that have ever been implemented for the person as well as any questionnaire that is assigned to any of the current collaborations in which the person is participating.

• Ever Implemented means any questionnaire for which one or more assessments have been started or completed at some time for the person
  
  
• Currently Assigned means all questionnaires assigned to any collaboration the person is currently enrolled in, whether or not an assessment for that questionnaire has ever been started or completed.
  
  
  • For Example: Here we see Princess Cinderella. She has two Questionnaires listed in the table. I know that the second questionnaire here, CANS for Standard Care, is a questionnaire that is currently assigned because of her current collaboration. Whether or not she has assessments completed for that questionnaire, it will show here because it’s currently assigned. The first questionnaire here is not currently assigned. It’s here because she has assessments completed for that questionnaire. If you remember from our last tutorial, Princess Cinderella was participating in a Crisis Care collaboration during July of 2019. This may have been an assessment that was assigned to that collaboration at the time of her participation. But if she never had any assessments completed, it would not show up now.
    
    

Questionnaire Characteristics:

Questionnaires are identified and distinguished by several characteristics. In the questionnaires table you may see multiple questionnaires for the same instrument. Use the following identifiers to determine which questionnaire you should choose.

• ID: The ID is a unique number assigned to the questionnaire.
  
  
• Instrument: This is the instrument that the questionnaire is based on. No matter how many versions are made, and how many edits are made, the Instrument name remains the same.
  
  
• Questionnaire Name: An instrument may have multiple versions. The Questionnaire name provides additional information about the version.
  • For example, there may assessment questions that are specific to your state or county. So the Questionnaire Name may include state or county identification.
    
    
• Reminder Schedule: The reminder schedule is a description of the reminder schedule for the questionnaire
  • Each agency will define how often reminders will be sent for upcoming due assessments and what the reminder schedules will be called. But an example of how this might work is that a questionnaire might have a version with a standard reminder schedule where a staff is reminded of an upcoming due assessment every 6 months. And the questionnaire might have a version with a priority reminder schedule, where a staff is reminded to complete the assessment every 7 days. Knowing what the reminder schedule is helps you anticipate how often you will receive reminders regarding that assessment.
    
    
• Alert Schedule:
  • The alert schedule is also defined and named for each questionnaire. Alert types are set by your organization administrator in the Settings Module and are specific to your agency. In this example, a Crisis Alert might alert you when scores on an assessment indicate high needs related to crisis management, based on a set of pre-determined thresholds.  A Level of Care alert might alert you when scores on an assessment indicate the person may be ready to step down or transition to a lower level of care. An alert schedule may have one or more alerts associated with it. The name of the alert schedule for the questionnaire will identify what alerts you can expect to see related to assessment scores input over time.

Add Questionnaire: If there are no questionnaires ever implemented or currently assigned, or if you need to add a new questionnaire that is not currently listed in the table, click “Add Questionnaire”. You will see a pop up box listing any questionnaire associated with your agency. When you find the questionnaire you need, select and click “Add”. Now you will see the questionnaire added to the list in the questionnaire table.

View Historic Questionnaire Data

In the Questionnaire module, you can view Historic Questionnaire Data for any questionnaire that has ever been implemented for a person.

Once you’ve selected a Questionnaire from the table, scroll down. You will see the Instrument Name and Questionnaire Name, along with two filter options, Collaboration and Voice Type.

Collaboration: The first filter, Collaboration, will be set to “Lifetime” by default. “Lifetime” includes all questionnaires assessments started and completed for the person, regardless of the collaboration they were in at the time. You can filter down to just the questionnaires started and completed for the person during a specified collaboration time frame by using the drop down filter, which lists both collaboration name and start and end dates.

Voice Type: The second filter is for voice type. The voice identifies whose perspective and opinion the assessment is completed from. You can leave the voice filter at “View All” to see all assessments completed for the questionnaire or use the voice filter to see only assessments completed with a specified voice.

• Communimetric: The communimetric voice represents an agreed upon consensus between all team members after communicating.
• Person: The consumer voice represents the person’s own perspective and opinion.
• Support/Helper: And the support and helper voices represents the perspective and opinion of an identified support person or assigned helper.
• For example: If I want to see only the assessments for Princess Cinderella that were communimetric, I choose communimetric from the drop down list, and we see the number of questionnaires shown below go from 2 to 1.
  
  

View historic data

Once you have made your filter selections, click “Expand All” here on the right, and as you scroll down you will see past assessment scores reflected first in a graph then a table.

The graph shows a count of item types over time across assessments, ordered from left to right chronologically. You can adjust the visualization in real time using the toggles on the left. The icons used here are used throughout the module to highlight items of interest.

• The Hand icon identifies Needs for Focus
• The Pin, needs in the Background
• The Barbell, Strengths to Build
• The Arm, Strengths Present
• The Shield, Underlying Items
  
  

Assessment Information: Next we see supporting information for the assessment.

• Time: Time is based on the assessments available after filter selections, and always starts at Time 1.
• Status: Status of the assessment can be In Progress, Submitted, Approved, or Returned.
  • In Progress: In Progress means the assessment has been started and saved but has not been submitted*
  • Submitted: Submitted means the assessment has been submitted for review and is locked from edits
  • Approved: Approved means the submitted assessment has been approved by the reviewer and no further changes can be made by non-admin users
  • Returned: Returned means the submitted assessment has been returned by the reviewer and can be edited further.
    
    

So you can save the assessment and come back to it, and it will show as In Progress. And when you submit it, it’s locked until it’s either approved or returned.

• Voice Type: The voice identifies whose perspective and opinion the assessment is completed from.
• Days in Care: Total number of days the person had been in care at the time of the assessment. If using the collaboration filter, this is based on the primary collaboration’s start date. If not using the filter, this is based on the first assessments date in the system.
• Time Period: The time period is displayed by the number of months in accordance with the questionnaire’s schedule and the start date.
• Date: Assessment Date
• Person Score: Sum of total item scores for the person
• Support Score: And Support Scores show a Sum of total item scores for a Support or Caregiver
  
  

Following the supporting information for the Assessment are the assessment scores themselves.

Assessment scores are grouped by category at first, providing a sum of scores for each category. When you expand a category, you will see individual item scores within the category.

Color Coded Scores: With the categories expanded, you can see that the score boxes are color coded, to draw attention to highest scores over time. Here, the darker the box the higher the need. These colors are customized for each questionnaire when it is calibrated in P-CIS and are specific to your agency preferences.

For Example: So if we scroll through Cinderella’s assessments, we see that she has multiple traumatic/ adverse childhood experiences present. We won’t see aces change over time. And then we see pretty easily where Cinderella feels she has made progress, here in the area of traumatic grief, and the strength areas of family, community life, and relationship permanence.  And so on.

Status Icons: You’ll notice the status icons that were at the top, in the graph, appear to the left of the assessments here. By default, these icons are based on the most recent assessment. If you’d like to see icons for a different assessment, at the top of the assessment, click the time that you’d like to see. The icons show which items have been indicated as a need for focus, a need in the background, a strength to build, a strength to use, or an underlying item.

For Example: We see here that Cinderella’s aces have all been indicated as underlying items, so we see the shield. As of her latest assessment, she has no indication of need related to traumatic stress symptoms. All of the child strength items have been indicated as strengths to use. There’s Cinderella’s optimism shining through. She has lots of strengths and she’s ready to use them.

This is a good example of where it’s helpful sometimes to have all the assessments in view, and where sometimes it may be important to have a single voice only. So here, with only the two assessments present, it’s easy to keep in mind the context. The first assessment is the group communimetric assessment at the beginning of her School-Based Behavioral Therapy collaboration. The second is Cinderella’s voice only, about six months later. You can imagine, if you had 6-8 assessments here, without filtering down the voice it could be hard to keep context straight and make sure you’re comparing apples to apples.

Item Descriptions: Speaking of keeping things straight. If you need a refresher on any item, let’s say we forget what recreation means, we can expand each item to see its description and rating definitions.

Add or edit an assessment

If you have read/write permission in the system, you can add assessments for the person.

First, confirm that you have selected the appropriate Questionnaire. Take a look at the previous assessments added. Then click “Add” to start a new assessment. A pop up window will ask you for the following information.

• Date: Date of the assessment
  
  
• Voice Type: The voice type, which identifies whose perspective and opinion the assessment is completed from. The drop down options will include the person, any helpers or supports currently assigned to the person, or communimetric.
  
  
• Reason: Discharged, Scheduled, or Triggering Event
  • The first assessment and regular assessments throughout days in care are considered “Scheduled”. Then there’s the Discharge Assessment option and the Triggering event option, which is any event that would cause a need for an unplanned/unscheduled assessment. Maybe this is a caregiver disruption or a crisis care hospitalization.
    • If the questionnaire reason is “Triggering” then an event date and event notes are required. Event notes provide information about what triggered the need for the assessment.
      
      
• Notes: And finally, an optional space for adding general notes related to the assessment.
  
  

Next, you’ll choose how to activate the assessment by choosing one of the following options:

• Start Blank: The Start Blank option provides a completely blank assessment space for entering scores.
  
  
• Invite to Complete: The Invite to Complete option will send an email invitation to the voice type you choose, based on their email in the system. The email includes a secure external link, and with it the person can complete the questionnaire in their own voice.
  
  
  • For example, a helper may use this option to invite a caregiver to fill out a questionnaire from their point of view. In that case, the helper will choose the caregiver’s name as “Voice Type”, and choose “Invite to Complete” to activate the assessment. An invitation will then be sent to the email address that is saved in the system for that caregiver. To see a demonstration of the invite to complete option, see the video in this module, “Invite to Complete”.
    
    
• Copy Previous (for subsequent assessments): Finally, if an assessment has been completed for the questionnaire already, the user has the option to copy all responses from the previous assessment. If this is chosen, then the new assessment will populate with all answers from the most recent prior assessment. And this is what we’ll choose for our example.
  
  

Start Assessment

Once an assessment has been activated, I can start adding assessment scores using one or all of the following options:

• Radio Buttons: Each assessment item can be expanded to see the full Item Description and Item Rating definitions. On one side of each item score is its definition. On the other side is a radio button to choose its rating score. Also shown here, in parenthesis next to the score, are the shortcut key codes. These key codes provide a shortcut to filling out an assessment with your keyboard.
  
  
• Keyboard: Using the keyboard is the quickest way to enter scores, especially when starting from a blank assessment. Use your cursor to select the first item score box.  Enter scores one after another, and the assessment module will automatically move ahead item to item. No need to tab or enter. In this example, the scores are simply 1, 2, 3, and 0. But some assessment scoring is not so simple, and you’ll need to locate the key codes in the full item description as we just saw.
  
  
• Drop Down: Finally, you can use the drop down option. This can be very helpful, especially in cases where you are copying the previous assessment and only need to change scores on some items. Use your mouse, and use the drop down function to choose a score.

Items are grouped in categories. Click “Expand All” to view all categories at once. Or use the arrows to expand one category at a time.

View Icon information:

As you enter scores, you will notice status icons appear on the left hand side.

Icons appear based on the item type and item score. Icon defaults are based on rules set by the Org Admin and are designed so the user can enter information as quickly as possible, and the behavior of how that information will be handled is tailored to the collaboration’s logic model (e.g., program goals).

In this case, we can see that where the score is 2 or 3, there is a hand for that item, showing this is a need for focus. Where the score is 1, there is a pin, showing this is a need, but it’s a background need, something to keep in mind. And where the score is 0, there is no icon.

In the strengths domain it’s similar, with a barbell for scores of 2 or 3, showing this is a strength to build, and an arm for scores of 0 to show the strength is present.

Optional Alternate Icons: As we scroll down, we see that most items have two icons visible when the assessment is in edit mode, one dark and one light. The darker icon is the one that’s selected, and the lighter icon is the alternate available. So you can choose to change the status of an icon. These defaults are set up by the agency ahead of time, and again these are optional.

For Example: But let’s say in Cinderella’s case, attachment difficulties have improved, and the improvement in her score has dropped the item below the threshold for “needs for focus”, and has moved the item to a background need. But the team feels like we need to keep momentum going in that area, and that it needs to remain a focus in our treatment planning. I can choose to override the default, and instead select the hand. This identifies this item as a need for focus here in the questionnaire module, in the graph at the top, and in the story map report. So the score remains true, but the module and story map adjust to support the specific work I’m doing with Cinderella.

Underlying items are a little different. All items which have been identified as an underlying item in the questionnaire definition, will display an icon that looks like a shield ( ) when the response rises above the threshold set within the questionnaire template. In this example, the icon appears for any underlying item which has a score of 1, 2, or 3.

There are a couple additional options available to you here in the questionnaire module. Both can be accessed by expanding the item detail.

• Mark as Confidential: When you expand the item detail, there is an option to mark an item confidential. Items marked as confidential will be blocked from printing and sharing while they remain in the sensitive mode. Once you mark an item confidential, you will see that it is in sensitive mode by the white and grey stripes seen here.
• Add Note: You can also add notes to any item here. These notes will be visible within the questionnaire module and some of the following reports.
  
  

Assessment Status: At any point in filling out the assessment, you can scroll down to the bottom and cancel. You can save it at any point and come back to it. And when you are ready, you can submit the assessment. When an assessment is submitted, it will update your dashboard and the reports and insights in P-CIS, and it will be sent to whoever is listed in P-CIS as your reviewer. At that point, you cannot make any further changes. However, it will not become final until your reviewer approves it. If your reviewer returns the assessment, it will be sent back to you and have a status of “Returned”. At that point, you can again make adjustments. Once the assessment is approved, it is final.

That brings us to the end of our tutorial on the Questionnaire Module in P-CIS. Thank you for your time. Please continue to the next tab in the training hub to complete the learning tasks for this section.