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Past medical history: "the patient's past experiences with illnesses, operations, injuries and treatments"; Family history: "a review of medical events in the patient's family, including diseases which may be hereditary or place the patient at risk"; Social history: "an age-appropriate review of past and current activities".
The mental status examination (MSE) is an important part of the clinical assessment process in neurological and psychiatric practice. It is a structured way of observing and describing a patient's psychological functioning at a given point in time, under the domains of appearance, attitude, behavior, mood and affect, speech, thought process, thought content, perception, cognition, insight, and ...
Serial sevens (or, more generally, the descending subtraction task; DST), where a patient counts down from one hundred by sevens, is a clinical test used to test cognition; for example, to help assess mental status after possible head injury, in suspected cases of dementia or to show sleep inertia.
Other assessment tools may focus on a specific aspect of the patient's care. For example, the Waterlow score and the Braden scale deals with a patient's risk of developing a Pressure ulcer (decubitus ulcer), the Glasgow Coma Scale measures the conscious state of a person, and various pain scales exist to assess the "fifth vital sign".
The questions are most commonly used in the field of emergency medicine by first responders during the secondary assessment. It is used for alert (conscious) people, but often much of this information can also be obtained from the family or friend of an unresponsive person.
Different sources include different questions to be asked while conducting an HPI. Several acronyms have been developed to categorize the appropriate questions to include. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has published criteria for what constitutes a reimbursable HPI. A "brief HPI" constitutes one to three of these elements.
After all of the important history questions have been asked, a focused physical exam (meaning one that only involves what is relevant to the chief concern) is usually done. Based on the information obtained from the H&P, lab and imaging tests are ordered and medical or surgical treatment is administered as necessary.
A psychiatric history is the result of a medical process where a clinician working in the field of mental health (usually a psychiatrist) systematically records the content of an interview with a patient. This is then combined with the mental status examination to produce a "psychiatric formulation" of the person being examined.