Outcomes Framework - Clinical Severity Categories

Many scales support the notion of a clinical cutoff, or graded severity levels. Examples include Mild Depression or Moderate Anxiety. Each scale may have a different way to calculate this, and a discussion on the cutoffs is beyond the scope of this document. Please reach out if you have any questions regarding this.

Clinical Severity is one of the most valuable ways to look at outcomes, as it allows you to answer questions such as ‘what % of patients have achieved remission of symptoms’.

In order to simplify analysis, Mirah takes the scale’s clinical categories and maps them into one of four severities:

• None
• Mild
• Moderate
• Severe

This simplification allows easier analysis of outcomes, but two notes must be taken:

• Scales with more than four categories will have their outcomes compressed down to these four categories. For example, the PHQ-9 has Moderate depression, Moderately-Severe depression and Severe Depression. In the Mirah tool, Moderately-Severe is categorized as ‘Severe’.
  • If you wish to be more precise, you may use criteria on the underlying score (e.g. score > 15).
• Not every scale will have all four severity categories.

The Mirah Outcomes Framework will automatically show you only the clinical severities that the scale supports.

See how Severity is used as Success Criteria here.