Quality of Mental Health Clinicians and Operations Drives Better Outcomes

If your organization is considering a telepsych program or has already added telepsych services, the key to long-term success is establishing and maintaining a high level of quality. By combining the right clinicians, tools and processes, healthcare organizations can improve outcomes for both their patients and their own businesses.

So how can organizations ensure they’re delivering quality care? Successful programs should enhance in-person care, not replace it, with clinicians working closely with existing care teams to treat patients. Integrating telepsychiatry with your existing services allows you to streamline operations and have greater oversight and quality control. Here are five elements your telepsych program should consist of in order to ensure the delivery of high-quality mental health care.

For many Native Americans, a history of trauma, poverty and other factors have made mental health issues a way of life. Native Americans are 1.5 times more likely to experience mental illness than the general population, and three times more likely to compound the problem with substance abuse. For Native Americans living in tribal communities, the situation is made worse by the fact that access to treatment is often hours away.

Micah Nickey knows firsthand the difficulties these communities face, and the role that telepsychiatry can play in helping to solve them. A Sicangu Lakota and an enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, his extensive behavioral health background includes his role as behavioral health director for the Forest County Potawatomi Health and Wellness Center. It was during his time there that he was first exposed to Regroup, when the company was hired to provide telepsych services. Micah recently joined Regroup, where he felt he could have an even greater impact in delivering quality care to Native Americans across the country.

Here, Nickey discusses how telepsychiatry can help tribal populations access much-needed, high-quality mental health care, and how these communities can tailor care to their specific needs.

Regroup has achieved the rank of #5 in Growjo's US Healthcare Segment- and #1 in the Midwest - based on growth indicators and a predictive analysis algorithm unique to the Growjo 10000. 

David Cohn, Regroup Founder & CEO, Matthew Slovitt and Bob Silverstein recently joined other healthcare leaders at the 2019 InTouch Telehealth Innovation Forum to hear from organizations that are on the leading edge of integrating innovative processes and models of care delivery.  Read some key points made from various leaders as they gave their perspective on the future telehealth.

Reliable technology can be the difference between effective telehealth solutions and low-quality patient care. As a leading provider of integrated telemental health services to organizations across the country, Regroup delivers top-tier performance through all technical elements of its care delivery model, including the secure, HIPAA-compliant RegroupConnect virtual care platform. With Zoom as the platform's foundation, this ensures uninterrupted patient experiences and high-quality care to drive better clinical outcomes. 

Read the case study to see how Regroup has leveraged Zoom's high-performing, compliant videoconferencing and meeting technology to deliver over 100,000 patient sessions annually.

For healthcare organizations that offer mental health services, the challenges of psychiatrist staffing are all too familiar. Faced with a nationwide shortage of behavioral health providers, many healthcare facilities can’t hire fast enough to keep up with growing patient demand. Even among facilities that recruit behavioral health clinicians successfully, the process is often a big drain on time and resources, with the search for a psychiatrist costing $30,000 on average.

As behavioral health programs mature, these challenges can become even more complex for organizations. Many find they need clinicians with highly specialized skills to treat specific patients or conditions, making it especially difficult to find the right hire. Meanwhile, in-house staff can become overwhelmed with needs they may not be well-equipped to handle, from substance abuse to eating disorder issues. That’s where telepsychiatry comes in.

Primary Care Doctors Can Partner with Telepsychiatrists for Mental Healthcare

As telepsychiatry continues to expand across healthcare settings, many primary care providers (PCPs) are seizing the opportunity to meet their patients’ behavioral health needs. With 90 million Americans living in mental health shortage areas, a PCP is often their only connection to the healthcare system. 

As the primary resource for children and adolescents on Medicaid experiencing a mental health crisis, The Center for Youth & Family Solutions (CYFS) in Bloomington, Illinois, provides critical support to some of the area’s most vulnerable families. For the nonprofit agency, however, finding a financially sustainable way to connect children with high-quality mental health care was an ongoing challenge. 

There’s nothing cookie-cutter about telemental health care. Just as each patient’s needs are unique, so are each facility’s needs for implementing an effective program. Beyond finding the right clinician, telepsychiatry success requires technology and processes best suited to your facility’s particular structure and goals. Having a partner committed to meeting the needs of your organization can make all the difference.

Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach to technology, a partner who provides customized tools, training and support can help:

• Maximize billings by avoiding technical problems that cut into patient sessions
• Improve operational efficiency and free up facility staff for other high-value tasks
• Turn psychiatrists into “tele”-psychiatrists and ensure satisfaction among staff, clinicians and patients alike