Charting the Legal Environment of Health Information

Over the past several years, increased attention has been focused on the importance of health information to health care quality improvement. The level of focus on health information has increased with the advent of electronic medical records and electronic health information systems designed to facilitate the use of health care data. Although these systems are still in their relative infancy, they hold enormous promise for revolutionizing the availability and use of health information to improve clinical performance, empower employers and consumers to better understand health plan choices and facilitate health claims administration. Their potential has been a catalyst for change in a growing number of communities, with the emergence of private/public partnerships to develop regional health information systems

Bilingualism, Language Disorders and Intercultural Families in Contemporary Italy : Family Relations, Transmission of Language and Representations of Otherness

This study aims to show how language disorders in children affect language transmission and the mixedness experience in intercultural families. To this end, it adopts a qualitative method of study based on the administration of ad hoc interviews to intercultural couples who consulted our Child Neuropsychiatry Service because of language disorders in their children. One of the main consequences, when the child of an intercultural couple presents a language disorder and a diagnostic process has to be initiated, may be interruption of the transmission of the second language, especially if it is the mother's language. The decision to do this, which may be taken on the advice of teachers and health professionals, but also because the parents themselves often attribute their child's language disorder to his bilingual condition, affects not only the relationship between the mother and her child, but also processes in the construction of parenthood and in the structuring of the child's personality and the plurality of his affiliations. A clear understanding of how the dialectic between the categories of "alien" and "familiar" is managed in these contemporary families, which have to reckon with the condition of otherness, is crucial for psychiatrists and psychotherapists working in settings in which cultural difference is an issue to consider