ADHD Assessment Process and Cost
ADHD assessments at Ally are performed as a stepwise process. Payment is due at the time of each appointment for services not covered by insurance. In an effort to save you both time and money, your provider may advise you against continued testing if they do not feel that it is needed. You may also discontinue the assessment process at any time if you decide that you don’t want to proceed and continue working with your provider on other mental health concerns.
Step 1: Initial intake evaluation
This is the starting point for every patient we see. At this appointment, we will discuss your mental health history and any or all diagnoses we feel should be considered. Occasionally, this process may take more than one appointment. If the provider feels that you may have ADHD symptoms, you will be sent several screening tests to gather more information. If not, your provider will explain why they feel that an ADHD diagnosis is less likely than an alternative diagnosis, like anxiety. Cost: typically covered by insurance; $400 if paying out of pocket
Step 2: Completion of Screening Questionnaires
You will be sent a set of screening questionnaires for completion at home. Some of these ask about ADHD symptoms directly, while others screen for conditions that can closely resemble ADHD to be sure that any alternative or coexisting causes of your symptoms are not overlooked. These questionnaires are individually brief but cover a wide range of disorders, so don’t feel you have to complete them all at once! You’ll also answer some questions about your health and childhood development that may give us a better understanding of what other factors may be influencing your overall mental health picture. Cost: free
Step 3: Comprehensive History and Clinical Review
If your screening questionnaires suggest that we should still be considering an ADHD diagnosis, we move on to the most detailed part of the assessment, where we build a fuller picture of your history. Often, adults considering whether they may have ADHD struggle in particular with remembering childhood symptoms, so a large part of this step is a comprehensive documentation of your experiences prior to the age of 12. In addition, we also gather information from people who know you, both in your current life and during your childhood. We try to request this input from people in multiple areas of your life, since gathering more than one perspective gives us a fuller and more balanced picture than any single account can provide.
Once all this information is gathered, your provider carefully reviews and interprets it as a whole, considering your medical history, questionnaires, and accounts from those who know you. This synthesis is one of the most important parts of the assessment: it is where the separate pieces of information are weighed together and given meaning. This allows your provider to determine whether the overall picture is consistent with ADHD and to best advise whether you would benefit from moving forward to the diagnostic interview. Cost: $300 for evaluation and interpretation of all history and collateral information. This is NOT covered by insurance.
Step 4: Diagnostic Interview
If the information gathered so far supports ADHD as a probable diagnosis, the final step is a formal diagnostic interview. For this, we use the DIVA-5, a structured interview that aligns with current diagnostic criteria. It systematically examines each criterion, considering both your current symptoms and your childhood history within a single interview. This is intentional, as it allows another opportunity to establish that ADHD symptoms were present in childhood as well as adulthood.
A structured interview like this is thorough, but its conclusions are strongest when corroborated with other, independent information - which is exactly the purpose of all the work done in the preceding steps. Your history, your questionnaires, and the accounts of the people who know you are weighed alongside the interview, so the final diagnosis is based on multiple independent sources rather than a single conversation.
For the same reason, this interview is conducted by a different provider than the one who has guided you through the earlier steps. Bringing in a second clinician adds an independent perspective and helps ensure the diagnosis reflects the evidence itself, rather than any expectation that may have formed along the way.
The interview takes approximately 90 minutes. Afterward, the interviewing provider documents everything discussed and combines it with the rest of your assessment into a final report that explains their findings. Cost: $650 for interview, review of all assessment components and historical information, and written report. This is NOT covered by insurance.