Risk Identification with the Columbia Protocol is directive enough that you have an immediate indication of level of risk and flexible enough that interventions can be modified using clinical judgment. This enables everyone from parents to psychiatrists to utilize it’s evidence based features.
Triage works the same in most settings. The only thing that changes are next steps, which are setting specific.
The “score” is either Low, Moderate or High risk depending on where there are affirmative answers. The most worrisome answers are the same in all settings and are a recent (past month) “yes” to question 4 or 5 on ideation severity and/or any recent (past 3 months) behavior. Answers are color coded for easy risk level identification.
These screeners for primary care, emergency departments, law enforcement, corrections and schools have triage next steps right on the forms for easy identification. The only difference in these various screeners are the intervention examples that are specific to the setting. However, interventions should be changed to reflect your individual setting’s resources and policies.
This document incorporates the Columbia Protocol questions into the SAMHSA SAFE-T model with recommended risk categories.
The ideal triage model embeds the Columbia Protocol into the Electronic Health Record (EHR) and provides alerts for high risk answers. This example from NYOMH shows how this can work. For health/behavioral health care providers, there is no cost or license required to put the Columbia Protocol tools into your EHR/EMR. We often review screenshots for accuracy during this process and would be happy to look at yours if you desire. Feel free to contact us with any questions that arise during the build.