Free Mental Health Records of Deployed Soldiers Essay Sample

Brewin claims that about a third of the American forces who served in war in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from psychological health problems. However, the  overreliance of paper records in the army does not provide a reliable tracking system for mental health records for these troops who served in the two countries.  A report by Surgeon General from the Army Office indicated that there was heavy usage of paper based mental health records in the United States Central Army Command due to the failure of mental health providers not to enter medical details in the theater electronic health records.

According to Brewin (2011), there is no system for scanning and encoding mental records to aid in the search and retrieval from the Department of Defense recording system. Soldiers with mental health problems returning from deployment get a hard time trying to follow up medical claims and continuation of health care. This problem is further aggravated by failure of the Army to use electronic health records AHLTA to search mental health records.

There is controversy with regards to which system maintaining mental health records of Army personnel that should be adopted, the Military Health System is a favor of AHALTA while the Office of Army Surgeon Generals opting the a new technology regarded as Health Artifact and Image Management Solution which integrates with AHALTA.

Since the recording system should ensure interlinking between the mental health records and the past health records both systems do not provide an easy searchable for clinicians.  Maintenance of comprehensive health records of soldiers is very important in combating Post traumatic stress disorder in soldier returning from war. According to Brewin, the failure by the Army leadership was a contributing factor to failure to use the operational electronic health records involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

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