Is Keeping Psych Records Private a Good Idea?

The latest research suggests that preventing psychiatrists from sharing their patients’ records with their other doctors may actually do more harm than good.

Some of the most sensitive information in medicine involves mental health care, including the diagnoses, drugs and notes that psychiatrists include in their patients’ health records. The files can include anything from dosage of medications to people’s deepest fears and their most bizarre fantasies. So both regulators and health care professionals go to great lengths to keep such records private and for certain eyes only.

But in a study published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics, researchers found that hospitals that both use electronic psychiatric records and allow them to be shared with other doctors have a 32% to 39% lower rate of readmission within a month of patient discharge for mental illnesses.

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