About & methods
What this is
NeuroBlu Insights turns a clinical research audit into something patients and advocates can actually use. The audit asked one plain question across the whole field of psychiatry: when a guideline says a specific care step should happen, how often does it really happen? We found 57 well-defined care gaps, each one a recommended step that often gets missed, and turned every gap into a card with plain-language questions you can bring to an appointment.
These are patterns across the whole system, not a judgment on any one clinician. Most of the gaps come down to heavy caseloads, records split across different systems, and the simple fact that often nobody is tracking the checklist. They are rarely about a person failing at their job.
Where the numbers come from
The analysis is built on de-identified, real-world records from NeuroBlu, a large behavioral-health database drawn from U.S. mental-health care. For each gap we defined who it applied to (for example, everyone on a sustained antipsychotic) and measured how often the recommended step showed up in the record when it should have.
A few things are worth knowing about how to read these numbers:
- The rate we report is a worst case, not the final word. If a test isn’t in the record, we count it as not done. Some of those tests may have happened somewhere else and never made it into the chart, so the real gap is at most what we show, and sometimes smaller.
- For the flagship gaps, we compared every clinic that had enough patients and looked at the top 10%. When the best clinics miss a step only a little and most clinics miss it a lot, that tells us the problem is fixable and lives in the system, not in you.
- Several flagship cards show how much more often harm followed when a step was missed (for instance, more new diabetes among antipsychotic patients whose blood sugar went unwatched). These are associations from real-world data, stress-tested with extra analyses. They are not proof that the missed step caused the harm in any one person.
- Where the data let us, we checked whether some groups get missed more than others. Several gaps are not shared out evenly.
The flagship cards carry the most detailed numbers. The rest ship with the core recommendation and how often it’s missed, and we add to them over time.
A word about safety, in plain terms
This site is information, not medical advice. It describes what happens across large groups of people. It cannot know your history, your reasons, or what your clinician is weighing. Please take the following as seriously as we mean it:
- Never start, stop, or change a medication based on anything here. Some of the gaps on this site are about the danger of stopping a medicine too quickly. Suddenly stopping a benzodiazepine, for example, can be dangerous. Any change belongs in a conversation with your prescriber.
- The cards give you questions to ask. They do not give you instructions to follow.
- A card showing up for your situation does not mean your care was wrong. Sometimes the right answer is “we thought about it and decided against it.” What matters is that it was thought about, with you in the room.
Your privacy
Everything you enter on the Build my checklist page stays in your browser
(localStorage). Nothing you check is sent to us or to anyone else. There is no
account, no tracking of what you select, and no server that ever sees it.
If you need help now
- 988 — Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text), free and available 24/7.
- Text HOME to 741741 — Crisis Text Line.
- findtreatment.gov — find mental-health and substance-use treatment near you.