Aspire Counseling is excited to announce the release of Blueprint: our new tool for delivering measurement-based care in counseling. This innovative new tool will help us deliver evidence-based care to our clients, and provide therapists with an easy way to share homework assignments and handouts.

A Quick Review: What is Measurement Based Care in Counseling?

Measurement Based Care is a way of delivering mental health care where your therapist or counselor uses data to determine what inform your mental health treatment. Your mental health professional uses data to help select the best treatment for your and assess how well your mental health treatment is working over time.

Our Counselors & Therapists Have Always Used Measurement Based Care in Counseling

Aspire Counseling has been offering evidence-based counseling for years. Our therapists have always used measurement based care in counseling because we believe you deserve the best possible results from your time with us.

We’re proud to start using Blueprint this Fall as a tool that helps our therapists deliver measurement-based care in counseling. You'll get the same great, evidence based care that you've always received...only better. Our main goal is to help you feel better. We believe in the power of evidence based treatment in counseling and using scales & other data to inform treatment is incredibly evidence based. So....Aspire Counseling's use of data isn't new.

But our approach to measuring data IS new.

Blueprint will Make it Easier for Our Therapists to Regularly Assess Your Symptoms & Progress

It will also make it easier for our therapists to regularly assess your symptoms and progress. Your therapist can set it up so that you automatically receive a link to complete screening tools on a regular basis. This means that you won't have to login to our client portal each time we want you to take one of these tests—it'll be done automatically! In addition, Blueprint gives us the ability to assign extra screening measures or homework assignments directly from within the program itself.

This makes it much easier for us as counselors at BetterHelp to monitor how our clients are doing over time and adjust accordingly by giving them more personalized care

How Aspire Counseling is Implementing Blueprint to Improve our Measurement Based Care

Blueprint is a tool for our therapists to use to help you track your progress and make informed decisions about treatment. We plan to use this tool in several different ways throughout your treatment at Aspire Counseling.

Assessment & Treatment Planning

We use Blueprint from the very start of our work with you. In fact, our Client Care Coordinator will generally send you some initial scales through Blueprint before you even meet with a therapist for the first time. It's a simple process to complete these scales by clicking on a link you'll receive via text. We generally recommend you download the Blueprint app as that will allow your therapist to later send you homework assignments or have you keep a therapy journal of sorts on the app. However, if you'd prefer not to download the app, that is totally fine. You'll still be able to fill out the screenings when they are sent via text by following the link.

Your therapist will then use the results of these screenings as part of their assessment process. Essentially, this information, when combined with all the information you give us on your intake paperwork and that you share with your therapist in your first couple of sessions, gives us a baseline understanding of your symptoms, how well you're functioning, and what areas we should focus on in treatment. It helps us develop meaningful, measurable goals so both you and your therapist know if you're getting "better" throughout your work together.

Assign Homework, Worksheets & Check Ins

One of the cool things about Blueprint specifically is that it doesn't only include your screenings. There are other things it can do. For example, it's a great way to keep track of homework assignments or worksheets. If your therapist assigns you something to do between sessions, they can easily send it to you through the app so you can complete it directly on the app.

One example of this might be Cognitive Processing Therapy worksheets for someone going through CPT as PTSD treatment. CPT is a great, very effective PTSD treatment but it involves a lot of worksheets which have historically meant you'd have to fill those out on paper and bring into session or it was completed on another app separate from everything else we used and that wasn't easy to share with your provider. As an added benefit, the weekly PCL-5 symptom screenings you do will be in this same app (Blueprint) that your homework assignments are given.

Your therapist can also have you do a daily symptom monitor where you each day rank your moods or some specific behaviors to help give them a really clear picture of how you're functioning between sessions.

It's important to note that not every homework assignment might be given through Blueprint. Many of our clients are participating in comprehensive, adherent DBT. While Blueprint has a number of diary cards a therapist can assign as homework, we often prefer to really individualize diary cards to help you get the most out of them. Unfortunately, these personalized diary cards can't yet be assigned through Blueprint, but they are working on fixing this hopefully in the near future.

Essentially, we see Blueprint as a way to easily assign homework that is evidence-based and effective, help you track your progress, and make it easy for you to communicate with your therapist between sessions.

Assess Progress & Tweak Treatment Planning

Lastly, but perhaps the most important of all,  Blueprint is a way for us to measure your progress. Just like how we use those initial screening results to help develop treatment goals, we'll also periodically (usually at least monthly) have you fill out some additional scales. These will help us see if we're on track or if we need to make some changes to your treatment plan.

Your therapist may also share your results with you at times.  We believe that knowledge is power and the more you know about your progress, the more ownership and buy-in you'll have in your treatment. Sometimes, it feels like getting "better" takes forever and it's hard to see your progress from week to week.  But, when you have a chance to step back and look at your progress over the course of several months, it's usually much easier to see how far you've come. Blueprint allows us to easily show you this progress as it shows your results from each time you've taken screenings in a nice graph form that's easy to understand.

Questions About Cost

You may have gone to the doctor and they ordered a blood draw. Sometimes they're screening for various medical conditions. Other times, they're assessing to make sure you have the right dose of a medication or that a treatment is working properly. And you generally expect that you'll incur a small charge for this service. Our screening and assessment service is similar. We'll charge you a small $15/month fee for the first screening you're sent.  After that, your therapist may assign you additional screenings, homework and check-ins throughout the month for no additional fee.  So, you may do one screening per month or several. It all depends on what you and your therapist decide is best for you and your treatment.

We believe that this is a fair fee as it covers the cost of the screenings and assessments, which are all evidence-based and have been validated for use. But we wanted to keep the cost as minimal as possible and if this charge will prevent you from being able to work with one of our therapists, please let us know.

Conclusion

We're really excited about Blueprint and we think it will be a great way to help you get the most out of your counseling experience.  We are excited that this new tool gives our counseling and therapy clients more control over their care and we believe it will help our clients make improvements in various areas of their lives even faster. 

We know it takes courage to seek help, and it can be difficult to get back on track with life when you’re struggling with mental health issues. Our goal is to make this process easier by providing you with a tool that will help you track your progress and see the benefits of treatment in your everyday life.

At Aspire Counseling Center, we believe in providing each client with customized treatment plans based on their individual needs—no matter what those may be! If you have any questions about Blueprint, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We'll be happy to answer any questions you may have and do whatever we can to make your counseling experience a positive one.

About the Author

Jessica Tappana is the founder of Aspire Counseling. She believes deeply in the power of good, high quality psychotherapy to transform lives. She believes that in order for therapy to work the absolute best possible, clients need to have a positive connection with the right therapist (thus our emphasis on pairing you with the right person), be provided evidence-based treatment tailored to their specific concerns and have a therapist who regularly checks in about what's going well and not going well. She's very excited to start using Blueprint (why didn't we start using it yesterday?!?) to help serve our clients even better.