No one in the healthcare industry should believe that the country has a severe shortage of mental health professionals, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic. The news to many is the different ways that different telehealth technologies are being used to help tackle mental health staffing.
As medical director of Iris Telehealth, Dr. Tom Milam manages a team of clinicians and guides them in telemedicine and industry best practices.
Milam has held leadership roles throughout his psychiatry career and spearheaded the extrasensory neuroscience initiative at the Virginia Tech Carilion Medical and Research Institute, where he still serves as an associate professor. Milam is also an ordained Episcopalian priest and holds a master’s degree in theology from Yale.
We interviewed Milam to discuss:
- How service providers are using telehealth to try to limit provider burnout as demand for behavioral health services grows.
- How proper licensing and certification can help address the shortage of psychiatrists
- How telepathy is helping with issues around behavioral health is putting vulnerable populations at an even greater disadvantage.
Q. How are hospitals and health systems turning to telehealth to address provider burnout as demand for behavioral health services grows?
First, I think it’s important to understand the dynamics of “vendor burnout”. Most people who seek health or behavioral health services are service-oriented, compassionate people. They focus on wanting to use the skills they have to serve people. Anything that prevents that from happening creates dissatisfaction.
Unfortunately, electronic health record systems can increase burnout by forcing behavioral health professionals to spend too much time navigating their screens and conducting data entry and tasks. administrative work.
Additionally, new reporting requirements are adding to that administrative workload and exacerbating burnout for clinicians. When you spend most of your day looking at a digital keyboard or screen instead of at the patient, it takes a toll and dismay.
Telehealth is one of the keys to a better work-life balance for providers, as this setting gives them more control. They can interact with family on breaks, spend time with pets, cook, or do other things around the house to restore that balance.
Telehealth can reduce provider burnout by eliminating long commutes that can be stressful and costly, and freeing up time for doctors to see their patients in their homes.
So while providing coffee and a seating area and a doctor’s meditation are nice gestures, they don’t address the core need to restore work-life balance to the patients. doctor. However, Telehealth does so directly and immediately.
Q. How can telemedicine, combined with proper licensing and certification, help address the nation’s current shortage of psychiatrists?
ONE. More than three-quarters of US counties face a shortage of psychiatrists, and more than two-thirds of primary care providers have difficulty referring patients to psychiatric providers. . But I want to emphasize that the shortfall extends to other behavioral health professionals, such as licensed nurse practitioners and clinical social workers, all of which can be of value. for the behavioral health needs of the patient.
While the use of licensing and validation software at the state and hospital or health system levels has made licensing and licensing somewhat more efficient, it still requires a lot of data from the provider. Every time they change jobs, doctors have to explain everything they’ve done since college and vacations longer than three months.
In terms of reducing the shortage of psychiatrists, the key will be to encourage more people to start studying psychiatry, which means competitive salaries, good work environments and guaranteed hours. meaningful to the patient.
While vendors are willing to work hard, they also want to feel like what they’re doing is making a difference. That’s why being able to interact with patients is so important to behavioral health professionals’ satisfaction. Telehealth allows psychiatrists from anywhere to engage patients across the country.
Q. Will telepathy help address many of the current problems facing behavioral health that are leaving vulnerable populations, such as low-income people, people of color, and children, at a greater disadvantage?
ONE. We must all make sure we are providing access to care for those who need it most. Those are usually some of the populations you mentioned – low-income families, people of color, children, other disenfranchised populations, and the elderly.
That said, I have friends, family members, and neighbors who call me weekly to ask if I can help them see a mental health professional. So it’s a widespread problem.
I see access as a three-part problem: reaching the provider, accessing the clinic, and then reaching the pharmacy. With regards to provider access, there are many waiting lists for people just to make an appointment with a mental health professional.
And getting to a supplier is not easy. The average U.S. physician appointment is a two-hour meeting that includes travel time, check-in, wait, clinician visit, billing, and homecoming. People who have a job or are taking care of children or the elderly in the family may not have as much time.
It is also expensive to transport elderly patients from nursing homes or assisted living facilities to clinics or hospitals and back, and then to the pharmacy. Even when there are Medicare and Medicaid trucks to transport eligible patients, absenteeism rates in many clinics exceed 20% and in some cases reach 50%.
The efficiency built into telehealth allowing patients to log in from their home or work provides a great solution for vulnerable populations to increase access to health professionals behavior when they need it. The default option is for the patient to go to the emergency room, which is not only costly, but also makes it impossible to provide appropriate treatment.
COVID has triggered a fundamental paradigm shift in the way we deliver care. While we have always needed clinics and hospitals, we now know how effective it is to leverage telehealth to care for patients where and when they need it.
Q. How are hospitals leveraging telehealth to improve patient throughput by balancing the influx of patients seeking rapid access to high-quality behavioral health care?
ONE. In the emergency department, the psychic department is open 24/7, giving patients access to high-quality providers around the clock. This access reduces the time the patient spends in the waiting room, as well as the length of stay in the ED. Psychiatric patients often stay in erectile dysfunction three times longer than psychiatric patients.
Distance psychiatry provides the expertise that ED physicians need to properly manage patients with acute and complex mental health conditions. In addition, telepathy offers significant financial benefits by cutting the cost of psychiatric inpatients, which some studies estimate an average cost of $2,264 per hospital admission.
Telepsychology helps organizations save on these costs and increase treatment opportunities for patients who need medical care and surgery.
In addition to ED, psychics can also open access to specialist behavioral health services in the continuum and can help hospitals and health systems manage referral queues. their patient and categorize patients to the right provider at the right time.
Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: [email protected]
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