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Advances in Psychiatric Treatment (2003) 9: 221-228
© 2003 The Royal College of Psychiatrists

Secondary uses of patient information

Paul Lelliott

Paul Lelliott is Director of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Research Unit (6th Floor, 83 Victoria Street, London SWIH 0HW, UK).

The pace of development and implementation of good information management systems has been disappointingly slow and the potential benefits of using patient information for secondary purposes have not been fully realised. The secondary use of patient data might be at the level of individual practitioners or teams, or at a local-service, regional or national level. Using patient data for purposes other than direct patient care requires an understanding of the principles of case-mix, standards for recording data, the limits of accuracy of data collected in routine practice and of the principles of data security and confidentiality. The alternatives to secondary use of information are to manage the mental health service without information about the people who use it or to gather this information through channels that run in parallel to the process of clinical care.

This paper continues the series on health informatics. Previous papers have looked at information organisation and communication (Lewis, 2002), confidentiality (McClelland & Thomas, 2002), knowledge management (Sensky, 2002), clinical governance (Palmer, 2002) and telemedicine (McLaren, 2003). The next paper will be on the use of routinely collected data.




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