EMR and Mental Health
Jun 21, 2017

A recent study released in The International Journal of Medical Informatics suggests that the inclusion of a psychiatric patient’s psychiatric records within their electronic medical record can result in a decreased likelihood of their re-admittance to a hospital following discharge. Within the scope of the study, the researchers concluded that psychiatric patients were 40 percent less likely to be readmitted to a hospital within a month of discharge when their mental health records were included in their EMR.
Carried out by Johns Hopkins University, this study involved the top 18 hospitals in the United States as they were defined in a 2007 U.S. News & World Report list. Of these top 18 hospitals, less than half of them included inpatient psychiatric records within inpatient EMRs. But even within the hospitals that included these records in EMRs, many did not make this mental health information available to non-psychiatric doctors. Overall, of the 18 hospitals surveyed, only 22 percent included mental health records in patient’s EMRs and made these record easily accessible to non-psychiatric doctors.