This session will address the roles of patients in providing, and clinicians in acquiring and evaluating, subjective patient experiences and the process of converting patient experience into analyzable data. Factors addressed will include accessibility to subjective experience, competence to judge symptomatology, subject sensitivity, method of assessment, and variability between patient reports and professional assessments. Using suicidality as an example, approaches to balancing different but overlapping perspectives and integrating them into an accurate whole will be discussed.

Learning Objectives:
Discuss the strengths and limitations of patient and clinician perspectives on patient symptoms and ways to integrate these vantages to obtain optimal understandings of subjective data
Discuss challenges in demonstrating instruments evaluating composite perspectives are fit for purpose.