The goals and limitations of Israel's psychiatric case register.

The Israeli Ministry of Health maintains a psychiatric case register that includes basic demographic and clinical information for all psychiatric hospital admissions since 1950. Currently, the case register includes information about some 130,000 people who have been hospitalized. The case register is an important tool in many aspects of mental health care planning, such as delineating problem populations, developing interventions, assessing the ramifications of policies, enacting programs for quality control, and conducting research. In certain situations stipulated by law, some information in the case register is shared with other authorities. Although the full potential of the psychiatric case register has not been exploited so far, creation of additional linkages with other databases and increased application of case register data in field studies could enhance its usefulness.