What is a severity scale?
Severity scale is a way to assess the intensity a symptom or observation. It is self-reported and dependent on your perception of the symptom.
In Folia, our severity scale is set from 0 to 5.
0 | Did not experience |
|
1 | Minimal | Barely noticeable, likely not requiring treatment |
2 | Mild | Noticeable, but does not significantly impact your health & life |
3 | Moderate | Impacting your health & life but not so serious that you need to go to see a healthcare professional immediately |
4 | Serious | Escalation that would prompt you to go see a healthcare professional that day or make an appointment to address |
5 | Severe | Escalation that might hospitalize you / you would go to the ER for |
Note: We have used a severity scale ranging from 0 to 10 previously. However, we found that the severity difference within this range was too arbitrary and hard to compare. Adapting a smaller severity scale allows for a more distinct difference between each number, resulting in more accurate self-reporting of symptom severity.
If you've previously used Folia and tracked with the 0 to 10 scale, all of your past data has been preserved and converted to the 0 to 5 scale. If you have any questions about this, feel free to reach out to the Folia team.
Why is this important?
Tracking an observation using the severity scale is super quick and concise. It is an easy way to produce a quantifiable metric from your own self-reporting of symptoms.
We can easily visualize how a symptom progresses over time by assessing changes in reported severity. Additionally, we can compare the reported severity with baseline to detect possible flare events and better understand your health.