Community Health Centers
- Rural Medical Clinics
- Rural Mental Health Clinics
- Underserved urban Clinics
- Federally Qualified Health Centers
Traditionally it has been a challenge to staff rural clinics. In some cases, clinics are so remote that physicians and nurses spend up to 30% of their time just driving between clinics. In more urban areas, shortages of mental health professionals may be as severe as in rural areas. Advantages to using telepsychiatry in these areas include:
- 24/7 psychiatric services without hiring additional psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants
- Preventing jails from being the de-facto mental health treatment center
- Improved medicine and follow-up compliance due to consistent treatment with one physician
- Integration of medical and mental health can occur seamlessly
- Improved physician satisfaction due to decreased travel, overnights away
- Less reliance on locum tenens physicians, and improved physician “retention”
- Patients appreciate the end of frequent, abrupt changes in psychiatrists
Click here for a PubMed article on telepsychiatry in rural settings. Click here for a PubMed article on telepsychiatry in rural American Indian communities. Watch a TV story on telepsychiatry in rural Iowa. Click here for a study on telepsychiatry in rural Ontario.
JSA Health Case Study:
Healthcare for the Homeless:
Cathedral and SEARCH Clinics
Healthcare for the Homeless (HHH) in downtown Houston, Texas, a general medical clinic serving the homeless population in the middle of the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the United States, had always struggled with how to care for their mentally ill homeless patients. In 2009, HHH served over 9,000 homeless men, women, and children, including a subset of incarcerated homeless. Predicting when a drop-in homeless client would need mental health services was impossible, and they couldn’t afford to keep a psychiatrist on staff for full or part time.
In June 2009, JSA Health Telepsychiatry used its 24/7 on-demand capacity to help HHH solve its problem. HHH physicians can now call for a JSA Health Telepsychiatry consult in real time, with JSA Health providing psychiatric consultations on an urgent basis – within 60 minutes and usually faster.
Preliminary results show that due to JSA Health’s earlier, high-quality interventions, there is improvement in:
- Compliance and medication
- Compliance with follow-up follow up appoints
- Successful linkage to community mental health specialists
- Overall costs of psychiatric medications
- No show rates of for psychiatric appointments…essentially zero because the patient is seen on demand when they arrive requesting medical treatment
