Roanoke, VA (PRWEB) July 24, 2014
“I developed the ADHD Comorbid Screen because, I wanted to help clinicians gather comorbid symptom information which would allow them to focus the clinical interview,” stated Margaret Weiss, M.D., Ph.D., FRCP, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. “The WACS allows clinicians to check the patient’s clinical mental status against the report of different informants. This alerts the clinician to symptoms they may have failed to identify, and to determine whether symptoms reported in one setting are present in other settings. I’m very pleased that these tools will now be widely available online through DefiniPoint.”
The WACS is a screening tool that helps practitioners to gather symptom information about conditions that are most typically associated with ADHD. By obtaining information from multiple individuals and settings (patients, parents, teachers, and others), the WACS helps the clinician to easily compare what informants describe, with what appears in the clinical interview, identify comorbidities, arrive at a consensus, and make a differential diagnosis. The WACS can be given to any informant, and is appropriate to patients in any age group, since items can be marked as not applicable. The WACS alerts pediatric clinicians to the prodromal adult disorders, as it also alerts adult clinicians in identifying child onset disorders they may not be familiar with. This facilitates the recognition of early onset adult disorders and neurodevelopmental disorders.
The Teacher Report of School Function provides clinicians with information on a student’s performance and behaviors at school as well as teachers’ perspectives and concerns. Both the WACS and Teacher Report are designed to facilitate communication between the clinician and informants during an ADHD evaluation and following treatment as part of an ongoing ADHD management plan.
“We’re delighted to offer these new instruments through DefiniPoint,” says Sam English, PhD, founder & CEO of Attention Point, the provider of DefiniPoint. “This is another example of our commitment to provide the most complete suite of online ADHD assessment tools to clinicians, parents, and teachers.”
Dr. Weiss is a world renowned researcher, clinician, presenter, and author specializing in ADHD through the life cycle. She directs the Weiss Clinic for ADHD Care and was the past Head of the Provincial ADHD Program Children's and Women's Health Centre in British Columbia. Dr. Weiss has published peer reviewed articles relating to ADHD in major medical journals, authored two book chapters on ADHD, and co-authored the book ADHD in Adulthood: A Guide to Current Theory, Diagnosis, and Treatment. As a full time clinician, she has made the agenda of her research the translation of clinical practice into evidence based care.
About Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
ADHD is one of the most common childhood neurobehavioral disorders. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, parents report that approximately 11 percent or 6.4 million children ages 4 to 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD in the US and 82.5% of diagnosed children are receiving medication and/or treatment by a mental health professional.
About DefiniPoint
DefiniPoint is the first and only complete online system that makes it easy and convenient to obtain needed ADHD behavioral information from multiple individuals. DefiniPoint enables clinicians to efficiently distribute, collect, and score many well-accepted ADHD rating scales for the evaluation and management of ADHD. For more information, visit http://www.DefiniPoint.com.