Welcome to the
The National Summit on Defining a Strategy for Behavioral Health Information Management
and Its Role within the Nationwide Health Information Infrastructure
More than 140 behavioral healthcare leaders met in Washington, D.C. on September 29-30 to begin laying the foundation for a nationwide information infrastructure for behavioral healthcare services. Participants included representatives from the major behavioral health professional and trade associations, government, provider organizations, consumers, standard-setting organizations, and business groups.
The National Summit was co-hosted in a public-private partnership by the Software and Technology Vendors’ Association (SATVA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). SATVA is a national trade organization whose member companies provide most of the software that helps run management and clinical operations for mental health and substance abuse agencies. SAMHSA is an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Presenters included national informatics experts from both general and behavioral healthcare. You can find them listed on the Summit Program webpage of this site, and you can access a high quality audio recording of their presentation simply by clicking onto the name of the presenter who interests you. Most presenters showed Powerpoint slides, which you will be able to view in synchrony with their audio presentations.
Six areas were identified prior to the Summit as essential for advancing a nationwide information management strategy for behavioral health. The Summit program was organized into intensive workgroup discussions that focused upon these six strategic areas, first identifying opportunities and challenges and then developing recommendations and specific action plans. You can listen to audio recordings of the workgroup co-leaders presentations of their workgroup findings by clicking onto the Summit Program and then onto the closing session for each of the two days in the Summit Program.
A written summary of the Summit presentations and workgroup recommendations is being compiled and prepared for distribution. It should be ready in late winter of 2006. Instructions for how to access it will be made available on this website. In addition, the co-sponsors are working together intensively on several informatics initiatives emerging from the Summit recommendations.
For more information about the Summit and its co-sponsors, contact either Dr. Tom Trabin, SATVA Executive Director at tom@trabin.com and visit www.SATVA.org, or Leah Young or Shelly Burgess, SAMHSA press office at 240-276-2130 and visit www.SAMHSA.gov.
Proceedings from the Behavioral Health IT Summit in pdf format