Most of you have probably heard about “meaningful use” and federal incentives to get going with an electronic health record. But how applicable is this for psychiatrists? And what in the world is “meaningful use” anyway?

The charge of this committee is to follow developments in electronic health record issues—more related to policy than to technology—and to serve as a resource for members and for other councils and committees of the APA.

By now you’ve probably heard about the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology’s (ABPN) new Maintenance of Certification (MOC) Program for psychiatrists. If you haven’t taken some action dictated by the new process, we have some bad news—you're probably already behind.

Drug samples are a staple of pharmaceutical marketing. The drug industry argues, quite logically, that samples are useful to treat patients who lack the funds to purchase medications. Yet some reformers have called for drug samples to be banned, an idea that has received a decidedly mixed reception.

It’s easy to order labs—it’s the interpretation that’s difficult. In this article, we’ll review some of the more common labs you are likely to order as psychiatrists and give you some tips on interpreting them, as well as discussing what (if anything) you should do when a lab is abnormal.

We’ve all been told from time to time that we should mind our manners. A Boston psychiatrist, Michael Kahn, suggests that manners are not limited to dinner parties; rather, he calls for “etiquette based medicine.”

One way to enhance the quality of our care of patients is to learn and implement expert practice guidelines. But there are some problems. First of all, there are so many guidelines out there that it is hard to know which ones to learn.

Should we use outcome scales in psychiatric practice? If so, which ones? Which are actually feasible in terms of time and utility?

The PHQ-9 is the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. It was adapted from an instrument originally funded by Pfizer, the PRIME-MD, which was developed as a tool for primary care doctors to screen their patients for psychiatric disorders.

In a ruling certain to make psychiatrists and their patients happy, the DEA has finally said that doctors may give patients 90 days worth of prescriptions for schedule II controlled substances, which includes stimulants and narcotics.