The Hopkins Competency Assessment Test (HCAT) was developed as a brief screening measure for assessing a patient's capacity to provide informed consent and prepare advance directives regarding medical treatments. As mental health clinicians have increasingly recognized the importance of accurately assessing a patient's ability to provide informed consent, the need for measures to quantify this ability has grown. The HCAT represents one of the first such efforts at developing a standardized approach to evaluating the capacity to provide informed consent by providing a systematic measure of comprehension. Although primarily used in research settings, this measure has the potential to help inform clinical judgments about decision-making competence.

The HCAT, developed by Jeffrey Janofsky, consists of a short description of the informed consent process and the durable power ...