An Updated Electronic Health Record (EHR) for Depression Management

Depression is a ubiquitous illness for which primary care is now on the front line, providing care to millions of patients. Identifying these patients and providing adequate care is beyond the capabilities of our current medical approach. New algorithms from research and unique techniques based on new technologies now exist for optimizing our current Electronic Health Records (EHR) into a powerful support tool for psychiatric patient care. This chapter examines the theories, biopsychosocial techniques, ongoing research, technologies, and protocols from other areas of Medicine that have been successful in capturing and evaluating patient status and guiding medical care. These concepts are modeled into how primary care colleagues can receive automated guidance and psychiatry can be referred those cases which require specialist intervention. A multimodality paradigm for an enhanced EHR which minimizes primary care physician efforts and maximizes identification, escalating management, and tracking of psychiatric patient care is proposed.