Information technology tools to improve treatment of patients with depression: focus on guidelines implementation

Information technology has the potential to improve and support the treatment of depression. Use of clinical guidelines can improve outcome of treatment, but implementation of guidelines is a demanding process and the resulting user compliance is often poor. Electronic health records, clinical decision support systems and other information technology tools seem at first glance to be a preferable way to implement clinical guidelines since they require user's active and problem oriented participation. This article reviews attempts made so far at use of information tools for implementation of clinical guidelines for depression treatment and discusses their effects. It turns out that there are few existing solutions, ambiguous effects and that usage is often limited. In future the factors determining development of successful electronic tools for clinical guidelines implementation will need to be further specified. Further research projects are underway in Slovenia to investigate these issues.