Navigating the worlds of information

Abstract

During the past several decades, major federal reports have repeatedly prioritized two areas of critical importance for improving the health and mental health of Americans: (1) promoting women's mental health services as an essential component of overall health; and (2) the development of a national telecommunication system for surveillance of health and mental health data. Women seek treatment for services across a variety of health and specialized mental healthcare settings, both formal and informal, and each encounter generates data. Although the healthcare field is being encouraged to develop national health information systems, each agency, organization, and delivery system has its own databases, formatting structure, and data collection and reporting requirements, often broken down by gender, age, and ethnicity. Further, each reporting stream may not relate to users and collectors of data across the variety of health and mental healthcare settings. © 2010 Springer-Verlag New York.