A very short Symptom Checklist‐90‐R version for routine outcome monitoring in psychotherapy; The SCL‐3/7

OBJECTIVE: Routine outcome monitoring (ROM) is applied in many physical and mental health treatments. The treatment course is monitored with patient reported outcome measures (PROMs). A potential problem with PROM is response burden. This can be decreased by presenting such measures with less and better selected items. The SCL‐90‐R is an often used PROM for psychotherapies and a number of very short forms have been developed; the SCL‐5, SCL‐8, SCL‐9 and SCL‐10. This study aims to develop a new very short form, the symptom checklist 3 out of 7 (SCL‐3/7) and to evaluate the effectiveness of these PROM with the precision relative to the complete SCL‐90‐R score. METHODS: Item Response Theory analysis was applied to select the 7 best discriminating items, evenly distributed over the latent trait. A routing serves that patients only need to administer 3 items. RESULTS: In a sample of 15,055 cases, the relative precisions of the SCL‐3/7 were best for outpatients (122.7%), day care patients (111.8%) and inpatients (108.3). The SCL‐5 was best for juvenile patients (110.0%), and the SCL‐9 was best for addicted patients (107.2%). CONCLUSION: The SCL‐3/7 decreases patient burden in ROM and has a better precision in adult therapies than other SCL‐90 short forms.