Clinical Screening

To understand your problems and symptoms better, the Intake Coordinator will send you a secure, confidential, encrypted link to The Arroyos Social History Questionnaire (SHQ). You can complete the SHQ in the privacy of your own home on your computer or tablet. Your results are used by our intake staff to ensure that we can provide the services that you need as well as to begin to plan your treatment here. The Social History Questionnaire asks questions such as your current and past treatments for mental health and substance use problems, medications that you are taking, your medical health and history, social and occupational functioning, legal issues, and your goals for treatment.

Financial Screening

To understand your problems and symptoms better, the Intake Coordinator will send you a secure, confidential, encrypted link to The Arroyos Social History Questionnaire (SHQ). You can complete the SHQ in the privacy of your own home on your computer or tablet. Your results are used by our intake staff to ensure that we can provide the services that you need as well as to begin to plan your treatment here. The Social History Questionnaire asks questions such as your current and past treatments for mental health and substance use problems, medications that you are taking, your medical health and history, social and occupational functioning, legal issues, and your goals for treatment.

Preintake Assessment

The Arroyos administrative and clinical intake staff reviews your completed clinical and financial screening documents when we receive them. Assuming that we feel that you are a good match for our programs and services, your Intake Coordinator will schedule a Clinical Intake Appointment with the Clinical Director, a licensed clinical psychologist. This appointment will be either in person or via telehealth.

Before this appointment, you will need to complete a pre intake assessment consisting of the following;

• Practice telehealth session: All patients, regardless of whether their session is in-person or via telehealth, are required to have a brief practice telehealth session with our IT Coordinator. Because telehealth has become an integral part of the delivery of psychological services, all Arroyos patients must know how to reach our office and see a doctor using our telehealth system.
• Psychological testing: You will be asked to complete some brief psychological tests to help us understand your symptoms and conditions better. If you are seeing the doctor in-person, you will take the tests on a computer at our office shortly before your appointment. If you have a video telehealth session with the doctor, we will send you encrypted, secure links, just as you completed for the PHQ, for these tests.
• Vital signs: IF you are seeing the doctor in-person, an administrative staff person will take your vital signs (heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, respiration, blood oxygen level) at our office shortly before your appointment. If you have a video telehealth session with the doctor, you will be asked to provide us with a copy of vital signs taken recently by staff in your local physician’s office.

Clinical Intake Appointment

The Clinical Director routinely conducts your first appointment at The Arroyos or their designee. He or she will welcome you to our practice, help set initial goals for your treatment, and review your SHQ and other records that you may have provided. Your doctor will then ask follow-up questions to clarify your mental health diagnosis as well as any substance abuse and medical issues that might be present, and develop an initial treatment plan with you.

Your treatment plan most likely will include individual psychotherapy, and may also include medication management by an Arroyos psychiatrist, group therapy, family or couples therapy, psychological testing, and/or laboratory testing. Every patient’s treatment plan is different, and your initial treatment plan is something that you and your doctor develop together through discussion throughout this intake appointment.