M5 ED Tele-Psychiatry Implementation Discussion

Based upon Case Study 13 in the Health Care Information Systems textbook, answer and discuss the following questions:
What are the benefits associated with using tele-psychiatry services in the ED? To the patient? To the hospital? To the medical staff members? What are the barriers or challenges?
How equipped is Westend Hospital to implement tele-psychiatry services? What resources does it have in place? What resources might be needed?
How might the staff of Westend Hospital measure the success of its tele-psychiatry services? What metrics might be used?
For this discussion;
Initial post: 450-500 words
References required: 1 from a peer-reviewed or scholarly sour

ANSWER

Implementing Tele-Psychiatry in a Hospital Emergency Department

Telepsychiatry involves diagnosing and managing mental health problems using technology like videoconferencing. Psychiatrists and patients can connect face to face despite being far apart. Telepsychiatry offers many treatment options depending on the patient’s/family’s convenience.

Telepsychiatry benefits the hospital emergency department by making the management workflow more efficient, thus allowing health providers to attend to many patients simultaneously. The use of technology reduces staff burnout, consequently freeing up the ED to attend to other patients faster. Likewise, in telepsychiatry, the ED has a viable and ideal option for the management of mental health problems, which can also be used to offer emergency care intervention when physical meetings are not feasible.

Telepsychiatry services provide unique convenience to patients in several ways, including reduced waiting time in the event of a mental breakdown crisis. Patients are attended to faster with more ease since both parties can communicate more quickly and appointments can be scheduled with more ease. The health workers spend less time spent to diagnose and treating a patient thereby providing a faster better recovery. The telepsychiatry treatment method is safe, accessible, and convenient and protectss the patient from any form of stigmatization.

The hospital gains advantages from this treatment strategy as well. Telepsychiatry improves the hospital revenue capture. Healthcare providers receive minimal reimbursement for psychiatry patients in the emergency department. Therefore, if telepsychiatry increases the rates of discharge and throughput, bed capacity can be increased to admit more billable patients. This treatment strategy can help connect with certified psychiatrists, who are increasingly hard to access and recruit in many hospitals. One certified psychiatrist can provide services across several facilities.

Medical staff members also find telepsychiatry to be convenient for them in many ways including scheduling therapy appointments from a location of their choice, depending on their convenience. Staff members can schedule these appointments outside the normal work hours. Telepsychiatry is also cost-effective for staff members since it reduces traveling costs to many sites in a day, which adds them time and financial constraints.

Research into implementing the telepsychiatry treatment strategy has proven it to be an effective service delivery system for psychiatric patients. However, service delivery faces challenges due to the constantly increasing number of psychiatry patients in the emergency department over time. The mental health caseload increases rapidly. Up to 25% of behavioral patients end up in the emergency department involuntarily, making it hard to hatch a safe disposition plan. Identifying a strategy for an effective psychiatric consultation is a challenge that many hospitals face. Other challenges in using telepsychiatry are the legal and ethical issues like care duty, handling emergencies, and data, and confidentiality security.

Measures have been set to implement telepsychiatry services effectively. The team responsible for implementing the plan consists of IT hardware and networking specialist, a nursing informatics analyst, a medical staff services coordinator, and behavioral health nurse among other health specialists, all of who represent various activities to be instigated. The approaches set to bar the obstacles include identifying a new responsibility for the Westend psychiatrists and generating a plan when telepsychiatry is not feasible. The telepsychiatry service providers have recruited qualified psychiatrists and trained mental health nurses and have decided to liaise with the medical laws committee to organize and go through the bylaws accordingly. The implementation team will supervise the organizational changes needed to implement telepsychiatry services and general patient care procedures.

The metrics used to gauge the success of telepsychiatry services include the time spent in consultation services, to measure the speed at which the service providers respond to the patient requests. Providing quality care in a short time without compromising service quality is ideal in this instance. Accurate diagnoses directly impact the quality of service, thereby necessitating a platform that can be accessed and operated with ease. To implement telepsychiatry effectively necessitates the healthcare committee to implement all the necessary procedures needed in all the sectors that contribute to the success of telepsychiatry.

The hospital’s reputation heavily depends on its service providers. Healthcare service providers should be well acquainted with technological knowledge and know-how to operate it for the benefit of the patients and the hospital in general. Implementing telepsychiatry technology in hospitals can relieve service workload and add reimbursement to patients at a fast rate, and also provide safe, convenient, and accessible means of treatment to the patients.

References

Özgüç, S., & Tanrıverdi, D. (2019). Tele-psychiatry. Journal of Psychiatric Nursing/Psikiyatri    Hemsireleri Dernegi, 10(4).