Access content_items itemUpdated column in database

Hello,

We're trying to access the itemUpdated column in the content_items table of the database within Perch. The reason being - one of our clients would like Revision Date field. Rather than having a date field they manually update every-time they save, it'd be much better to have a field we can automatically reference - and if we can use the one that already exists without much trouble - it'd be great!

I know we can probably grab it using direct queries to the database - but then matching it up with content regions may require a bit of work (unless we just grab the most recent date for the region). However a method of access using perch itself would be preferable.

Thanks in advance for any direction/assistance!