With greater public awareness of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), clinicians face more requests from patients for ADHD testing. Widespread awareness, open conversations, and reduced stigma are all positives. But more people may be self-diagnosing ADHD, based on symptoms they learn about online.
So the pressure is on healthcare providers to offer confident, efficient, and accurate diagnosis. With a lot of subjective information out there, clinicians have an opportunity to use objective measures to give patients clear answers about the nature of their symptoms, evaluate their cognitive performance and mental health, and identify a treatment or referral plan.
To meet the challenges of this rising demand, Creyos created a specific ADHD Assessment and Report, available right in the Creyos Health platform.
This report improves patient experiences and outcomes, while offering healthcare professionals the confidence that comes with a screening tool that is:
In this article, we’ll address ADHD diagnostic criteria, scientific foundation, rating scales, score interpretation, and a step-by-step guide for administering the Creyos Health ADHD Assessment Tool and Report.
Please note: The Creyos ADHD Clinical Protocol and Report is not a standalone diagnostic tool. As with other Creyos Health assessments, any conclusions drawn from the Creyos ADHD Clinical Report should be paired with clinical interviews and observations, other mental health examinations or assessments administered, and other evaluations of the patient and/or the patient's family history.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has become one of the most common conditions that healthcare providers deal with every day. As per this article in the National Library of Medicine, it is one of the fastest growing conditions, among youth in particular:
Other studies are exploring whether instances of ADHD have only increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The causes they cite include “a lack of structure and anxiety about COVID or jobs during the pandemic". There are increasing instances of adult ADHD self report that physicians are having to assess and validate.
Patients want to know—what assessments are used to diagnose ADHD? With the readiness of social media information, a person who identifies with ADHD symptoms might first turn to a Google search for “ADHD test online,” seeking to validate their experience.
Many online ADHD tests lack scientific credibility. Yet, on the other hand, patients might feel hesitant to bring their concerns to a clinician because of the long and costly process typically involved in ADHD diagnosis:
While other computerized ADHD tests also exist, they often require:
How is this impacting clinical workflows? Long wait times and high costs mean clinicians and patients often rely solely on the adult ADHD self report scale (ASRS). Alone, this questionnaire is brief and subjective, and may not be enough to justify diagnosis.
Using only subjective measures, it can be challenging to determine if symptoms of inattention are coming solely from ADHD or other comorbidities or another condition altogether.
ADHD diagnosis often also requires a patient's academic records. But for adults getting diagnosed later in life, getting those records can be impossible. The standard process often leaves all parties wanting more concrete information.
This new condition-focused protocol is a direct result of feedback received from the Creyos community and is fundamentally different from the reports and protocols you may have used and reviewed to-date. Specifically, this new report involves five Creyos cognitive tasks that examine 14 specific markers of ADHD. It then highlights whether the individual is within or outside the typical rating scale range for each, making it easy to identify atypical performance on criteria associated with ADHD.
Our pre-built ADHD assessment is different from any existing protocols you may have created or used in Creyos Health.
It is made up of:
The Creyos ADHD Assessment takes less than 25 minutes to complete, making it easy for patients to be assessed in the appropriate setting for focus, either in clinic or at home.
The protocol also features the SART, a brand new, 6-minute task within the family of continuous performance tasks commonly used with ADHD populations. The entire ADHD assessment is pre-built and tailored to the condition, so a healthcare professional can easily administer the tasks and produce an objective, precise evaluation.
As with all Creyos Health assessments, an easy-to-interpret report is instantly generated upon completion. The ADHD report you’ll receive:
In speaking to healthcare providers, we consistently heard the need for an objective clinical report focused on ADHD. Our solution became clear: Use the latest neuroscience, drawn from over 350 peer-reviewed studies involving Creyos tasks, to develop a fast and efficient ADHD-focused protocol that results in a comprehensive, yet easy-to-interpret, report.
This ADHD protocol also draws from existing assessments and rating scales including:
The Creyos ADHD Assessment is focused on 14 markers—specific cognitive performance metrics within Creyos tasks that are associated with an ADHD diagnosis. The assessment can be tailored to include age appropriate questionnaires for adults and children.
To find markers validated through scientifically-supported associations with ADHD, Creyos examined over 100 peer-reviewed papers. We found:
The SART is a common task used with the ADHD population, and is part of the continuous performance test family—that is, tasks that measure attention and response inhibition over longer periods of time.
As outlined in depth in the Creyos ADHD Clinical Report Science Guide, the SART has proven to be a valid and reliable measure of sustained attention. It specifically measures the ability to sustain mindful, conscious information processing, even in repetitive, boring or distracting situations.
Completing the SART is simple: numbers flash on the screen and patients must press the spacebar or click the "Go" button for all numbers except the number 3.
1. Get Started: Click "Start Protocol" on the Patient Details page as you normally would.
2. Choose Your Administration Method: You can choose to send a link or an email to your patient to complete the assessments either in clinic or at home.
3. Choose Custom or Condition-Focused: A new screen will appear with the option to choose between two types of protocols.
4. ADHD Protocol: On the next screen, select from the available condition-focused protocols.
Please note: while ADHD is the only one available now, you will have the ability to choose from other condition-focused protocols in the future.
You can also navigate back to a custom protocol flow by clicking "Would you rather administer your own protocol?" and then assemble your own set of tasks and questionnaires.
5. Add Questionnaire: On the next screen you will have the chance to review the cognitive tasks and questionnaires included in the assessment, as well as the time required to complete the overall protocol.
Regardless of what questionnaire is added, the whole protocol should take 25 minutes at most to complete.
Depending on your patient’s age, the appropriate questionnaire will automatically be included, alongside scientifically validated tasks that are proved to correlate with ADHD via peer-reviewed academic papers.
Once your patient completes their assessment, you'll be able to access a simple, easy-to-read report focused on ADHD in the same ways as you always do—right from the patient’s details page or the general reports page. Rather than having the results spread out across assessment types, you’ll get a unified report that offers a summary, rating scales, plus a deeper dive into performance on each task.
In this next section, we’ll walk you through how to find and read the report. For more in-depth information, please download the Creyos ADHD Report Interpretation Guide.
1. Summary Page: The first page of the report is a summary that you can use to quickly derive useful clinical insights. An executive summary appears at the top of the first page for a quick overview of the results.
2. Markers: On the summary page, the rows highlighted in orange flag when a marker is outside the typical rating scales range. This gives you an easy way to review the information that matters most. The executive summary at the top both verbally and visually shows how many markers were met for that particular section.
An overview of all data and metrics on the summary report is provided below:
3. Typical vs. Outside the Typical Range: Each marker has a rating scale threshold used to determine if a patient’s scores falls outside the typical range. You can find these details under the Typical Range column.
The typical range corresponds to performance commonly associated with people who are not diagnosed with ADHD.
Outside the typical range corresponds, statistically speaking, to the patient’s performance being one standard deviation away from the mean, in the same direction as people diagnosed with ADHD in published studies. Note, these can be reflected in either higher scores or lower, depending on the marker.
4. Optional Questionnaire Scoring: If an ADHD questionnaire is included—such as the VADRS, SWAN, and ASRS—a total score is calculated, then compared to a rating scale threshold for ADHD symptoms.
These questionnaires combine subjective input from the patient with a systematic method of tracking and recording symptoms over time.
Here is what the VADRS summary report looks like:
Behaviors tied to each individual response that indicate ADHD symptoms are also highlighted in the Details Section. This allows you to quickly see specific behavioural problems or issues that the patient is experiencing:
5. Details Section: The Details Section provides additional context behind each task and its associated markers, allowing you to assess how close or far away from the rating scale threshold the individual scored. Also included on the Details pages are references that speak to the validity of each marker in the report:
That covers the end-to-end experience for this new clinical report focused on ADHD.
As you’re using the Creyos Health ADHD Protocol and Report, you may run into several questions, including:
To help you answer these questions and more, please download the Creyos ADHD Clinical Report Interpretation Guide.
With this protocol and report, healthcare professionals can better respond to patients’ questions and concerns around potential ADHD diagnosis, and monitor adults and children's ADHD symptoms with age-appropriate data. It’s clear that as greater awareness and prevalence of ADHD emerges, assessments that can provide an objective, scientifically-backed, and comprehensive look at cognitive markers are key to taking patient care to the next level.
If you have any questions or comments as you begin to use The Creyos ADHD Assessment Tool and Report, please let us know—you can contact us at help@creyos.com or send a line directly to your customer success manager. We look forward to hearing from you.
This post was edited by Mike Battista, Director of Science and Research at Creyos (formerly Cambridge Brain Sciences).