Anyone for networked psychiatric questionnaires?

If you're worried about your medical and genetic records being shared, how about your psychiatric records? (Logo by Logomagic of Boca Raton, Florida.)

Harmonex, a start-up based in Roswell, Georgia, is aiming to do this through a unit called CliniCom. While Sharon Allred is the CEO, most officers are related to founder Nelson Handal, a Dothan, Alabama based psychiatrist. His clinic has been folded into Harmonex.

Like Phreesia, whom we profiled last week, CliniCom starts with a pre-visit electronic questionnaire. But while Phreesia collects the data for doctors based on advertising, CliniCom collects its data for a network which assists in diagnosis.

The idea is that all relevant questions will always be asked in a psychiatric interview, that the collected answers will become an expert system, and that the suggested diagnoses will improve with time. There's also this goal:

Create a central secured database to allow for broader clinical research initiatives.

I don't know about you, but that last scares me.

Still, there is a lot of potential good here. Making certain patients answer all questions in a psychiatric evaluation is a good thing. A database which can assist in making diagnoses is a good thing.

But as time goes by, won't a lot of lazy psychiatrists just trust the computer, then use it to defend themselves when they're wrong? They would save a lot of time and money, pass those savings along, and maybe roll-up the whole industry. You ready for a shrink-in-a-box?