This video will help you to understand your client’s EPSI scores. 

Once you’re linked with a client and your client has logged a meal, they will be prompted to complete their first EPSI. They’ll then be asked to complete the EPSI every four weeks, to track progress.  This Eating Pathology Symptom Inventory, EPSI for short, is an outcome-evaluation questionnaire that provides you with clinically relevant scales of Body Dissatisfaction, Binge eating, Cognitive Restraint, Purging, Restricting, and Excessive Exercise. As you can see, the EPSI is easy for the client to complete and includes questions in plain english instead of clinical jargon. Once completed, your client will not receive their scores, which may be confusing, but instead they will see a summary of feedback authored by the creator of the EPSI, Kelsie Forbush.

The EPSI is also super easy for you to interpret, as you will now see. Once a client has completed the EPSI, you can view the results on your Clinician app. On your Home screen under Log Activity, you can view the client's results. You can also head to the “Patients” Menu icon on the bottom control panel and click on the patient who completed the EPSI, who in our case is Erin. Results are displayed as standard deviations from a healthy population mean. This is the “Z score”.

A positive Z score says the client is above or higher than what is typical for a healthy population. 

A negative Z score says a client is lower, or shows less pathology, than what is typical for a healthy population.

So, just remember, look for Z-scores above 1 and the higher they are, the more severe the pathology.

Once your client completes a second EPSI, you will see an upward or downward arrow next to the areas where they have seen at least a 0.2 standard deviation improvement or decline, to show you how they are progressing.

For a deeper dive into the results, click on the summary chart, and you can take a look at each individual response. Sometimes responses to questions can be just as illuminating as the scores themselves. If you are interested in a particular scale, click on the “Filter” button at the bottom and select the outcome area, whether it be body dissatisfaction, binge eating, or others.

Also feel free to thumbs up the EPSI to acknowledge a client's progress and give positive encouragement.

The app is programmed to administer the EPSI every four weeks. If you don’t want this to be administered monthly, go to the specific client's menu icon at the bottom control panel. Click on “EPSI Questionnaires”, and move the toggle at the top to say “no”.  
If you choose to administer monthly EPSI, you can start identifying trends in their Z scores for specific outcomes over time by heading over to the “Trends” tab at the top right of this page.

A word from the author of the EPSI

As a clinician and researcher, I am fascinated by results of studies that show clinicians who regularly engage in patient outcomes tracking have better therapeutic success. The work I have devoted to improving eating-disorder assessments has culminated in the development of the EPSI, a self-report tool that appears to provide a reliable and accurate “snapshot” of key thoughts and behaviors experienced by those with an eating disorder.

- Dr. Kelsie Forbush, Director, Center for the Advancement of Research on Eating Behaviors Patients respond to questions which are delivered in an electronic, user-friendly format. Patients receive a push notifi- cation and an in-app banner prompting them to complete the outcome assessment. Instead of being given raw scores, patients are provided with summative, author-approved feedback. (CARE), University of Kansas