ACE—A Comprehensive Patient Management System Developed for use in a Psychiatric Service

This paper describes ‘ACE’ (Assessment and Continuous Evaluation): a unique system of communication and documentation successfully developed for use in a large psychiatric service with a strong commitment to community based psychiatry. The system has three components – a uniform approach to case management, a comprehensive set of patient record documents and a patient information management database. These three are integrated in design so as to achieve the aims of providing a predictable and consistent approach to managing cases, making the monitoring of essential information such as case loads, throughput etc. easier and efficient and accommodating continuous auditing of the system.