[An internet based discussion board for persons with borderline personality disorders moderated health care professionals]. / Fachlich moderiertes Internetforum für Menschen mit Borderline-Persönlichkeitsstörung.

OBJECTIVE: From a psychiatric viewpoint the internet as a communication medium bears some risks but also has some exceptional potential. The paper reports about an internet based discussion board that specifically addressed people with borderline personality disorder and that was continuously moderated by mental health professionals. METHODS: Discussion board participants were monitored over the course of the study with regard to the perceived helpfulness of the board discussion and psychological symptoms assessed with brief versions of the Symptom Checklist (SCL-10) and the Borderline Symptom List (BSL-15). RESULTS: With more than 16 000 log-ins during the last month the web board found wide acceptance. The majority of the users stated, that the internet can easily reach people with mental health problems and reported that the continuous support by mental health professionals was helpful. Over the course of the project the web board users reported reductions with regard to the severity and frequency of borderline symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that the internet might be helpful in the treatment of borderline patients, especially with regard to the coordination of therapeutical interventions or as an amendment of traditional face-to-face therapies.

Electronic health records within integrated care in Germany.

The planned introduction of an electronic health card is seen as a milestone in the dissemination of extended electronic health records in Germany. This paper deals with the main issues likely to result from the use of the electronic health insurance card. The role of the patient in the health care process and the patients enhanced access to his or her personal medical record are reflected. A high level of acceptance of the electronic health insurance card and extended electronic documentation procedures can be expected if ethical, legal, and technological concerns of the public are addressed and appropriate incentives are established. Finally, the electronic health insurance card can serve as a useful aid to support the ongoing implementation of disease management programs for the most important chronic conditions in Germany.

Dead reckoning: demographic determinants of the accuracy of mortality risk perceptions.

General patterns of bias in risk beliefs are well established in the literature, but much less is known about how these biases vary across the population. Using a sample of almost 500 people, the regression analysis in this article yields results consistent with the well-established pattern that small risks are overassessed and large risks are underassessed. The accuracy of these risk beliefs varies across demographic factors, as does the switch point at which people go from underassessment to overassessment, which we found to be 1500 deaths annually for the full sample. Better educated people have more accurate risk beliefs, and there are important differences in the risk perception by race and gender that also may be of policy interest.