An ICT solution for community mental health--putting virtuality into the vision

The digital age has brought about revolutionary changes in the capacity and methods of managing information. There has been an evolutionary pathway leading from information technology through informatics to communication technology. The 'nineties' has been a decade of patient empowerment fuelled by Internet access and legal rights to information. Clinicians as a whole have lagged in their adoption of the new technologies. Mental health has been seen as a particularly difficult domain because of its multi-professional and multi-locational patterns of service delivery and its traditional reliance upon narrative in the absence of bio-pathologic data. The Hospitaller Order of St John of God has been facing these challenges. The authors describe an integrated information/communication technology (ICT) which can be provided on the clinician's desktop and show that the new integrated ICT affords new opportunities for addressing the needs of community-based mental health services.