No one wants to be “that person” – the one who died because the treatment team couldn’t obtain medical records in time. It’s what makes all of us interested parties in the healthcare reform debate. We talk about the money to make all the pieces of HIE happen because we know it needs to happen. We also know that because EMRs participating in HIEs will get all the labs and drugs together, our treatment will have a new degree of clarity and rigor. The inherent inclusiveness of Health Information Exchange will also draw healthcare’s boundaries to include behavioral healthcare and other marginalized health services, such as prevention. This has two important benefits. First, marginalized healthcare becomes intermixed with the standard treatment gradient, expanding it beyond the conventional one of medication to specialized care to hospitalization. In that way, accessibility to a wider variety of care is improved. Second, treatment regimes in the ’slow lane’ of healthcare must acknowledge that its treatment must be ready to be ready for ‘Prime Time’ as part of an integrated health record. The idea that a healthcare treatment note, particularly behavioral progress notes, will never be seen by anyone other than the person who wrote it, should come to an end. In time, as part of the evolving treatment community that helps each one of us, you should know that if a treatment professional can’t write a useful treatment note, behavioral or otherwise, they will have been asked to do something else. If healthcare reform and its mechanisms make it necessary for behavioral and other marginalized healthcare regimes to raise their standards, then we should learn to love HL7 and all its children.
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