Access to Psychiatric Records in EMR Systems

Medical centers that elect to keep psychiatric files private and separate from the rest of a person's medical record may be doing their patients a disservice, a Johns Hopkins study concludes.

"The big elephant in the room is the stigma," says Adam I. Kaplin, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and leader of the study published online in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.

"If you have electronic medical records, that's a good step in the right direction," Kaplin says. "But what you really need to do is share the records with non-psychiatrists. It will really make a difference in terms of quality of care and readmission rates. Let's not keep mental health records out in the cold."