Outcome Questionnaire-45
Track global distress across symptom, interpersonal and social role domains, session by session, with empirically derived alarm signals for cases that are going badly.
Psychometrics
The OQ-45 is the instrument that made feedback-informed treatment practical. Its three subscales are symptom distress, interpersonal relations and social role performance. Its distinctive contribution is not the score but the expected-treatment-response trajectory: actual progress is compared against the trajectory of similar patients, and cases falling below it are signalled to the clinician.
Cautions and misuse
The alert is only useful if something changes in response to it. Studies where clinicians received feedback but had no protocol for acting on it show much smaller effects.
Sources
Lambert, M. J., Whipple, J. L., & Kleinstäuber, M. (2018). Collecting and delivering progress feedback: A meta-analysis of routine outcome monitoring. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 520–537
meta-analysis