Traditionally, most hospitals have separated out the psychiatric record from a patient’s medical record. This was done historically because of the stigma and discrimination associated with psychiatric concerns — and the serious lack of training in medical school for physicians to understand such information in proper context.
As hospitals move to electronic records, the default behavior has been to simply keep things as they are — so no more processes than necessary have to change at the same time. This means keeping the psychiatric information in the electronic record segregated from a patient’s medical information.
But in an intriguing new study just published — on a very small cohort — researchers found that where hospitals allowed any properly authorized medical staffer to access the patient’s psychiatric information in the electronic health record (EHR), hospital readmissions went down.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline staffs the national suicide hotline (1-800-273-TALK) and now has teamed up with Facebook, the world’s largest social network, to offer online crisis services to certain Facebook members. 
It seems like the world will always be full of people who are charged with the responsibility of taking care of others but who just don’t seem to much care about how they do their job. Or whether they do it at all.