Executive Summary Released from SBM/NIH Meeting on Electronic Health Records

The Society for Behavioral Medicine recently partnered with several institutes and offices at the National Institutes of Health in a campaign to Identify Core Behavioral and Psychosocial Data Elements for the Electronic Health Record. You can now read the full Executive Summary of the meeting, which describes the proposed recommendations.

The executive summary also includes several anticipated immediate "next steps", including preparation of a more extensive report. We welcome comments and suggestions.

These recommendations are the result of a three phase consensus building process including:

1. A panel of subject matter experts was convened for each of 13 behavioral/psychosocial domains to review available surveys and to recommend up to 4 reliable, practical options for each domain appropriate to be reported in EHRs in primary care and public health settings.
2. The National Cancer Institute’s Grid-Enabled Measures (GEM) Database was used to gather feedback from a wide variety of stakeholders on the proposed set of options for each domain.
3. On May 2-3, 2011, a meeting was held at the NIH bringing together scientists, practitioners, policy makers, and patient/consumer representatives to review the results of the effort and to make recommendations on common data elements for behavioral health and health behavior screening in primary care and public health settings. The first day consisted of an open, town-hall style meeting to gather additional feedback from a wide variety of perspectives including patients, primary care, vendors, health care systems and policy makers. On the second day, a workshop of key stakeholders was held to make final recommendations based on feedback obtained from the GEM tool and the previous day’s discussions.

Please send any comments or questions to Maureen Boyle by June 10th, 2011.