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Review
. 2020 Sep-Oct:66:89-95.
doi: 10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2020.07.002. Epub 2020 Jul 9.

COVID-19 and telepsychiatry: Early outpatient experiences and implications for the future

Justin A Chen  1 , Wei-Jean Chung  2 , Sarah K Young  2 , Margaret C Tuttle  2 , Michelle B Collins  3 , Sarah L Darghouth  2 , Regina Longley  3 , Raymond Levy  2 , Mahdi Razafsha  2 , Jeffrey C Kerner  2 , Janet Wozniak  2 , Jeff C Huffman  2
Affiliations
Review

COVID-19 and telepsychiatry: Early outpatient experiences and implications for the future

Justin A Chen et al. Gen Hosp Psychiatry. 2020 Sep-Oct.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically transformed the U.S. healthcare landscape. Within psychiatry, a sudden relaxing of insurance and regulatory barriers during the month of March 2020 enabled clinicians practicing in a wide range of settings to quickly adopt virtual care in order to provide critical ongoing mental health supports to both existing and new patients struggling with the pandemic's impact. In this article, we briefly review the extensive literature supporting the effectiveness of telepsychiatry relative to in-person mental health care, and describe how payment and regulatory challenges were the primary barriers preventing more widespread adoption of this treatment modality prior to COVID-19. We then review key changes that were implemented at the federal, state, professional, and insurance levels over a one-month period that helped usher in an unprecedented transformation in psychiatric care delivery, from mostly in-person to mostly virtual. Early quality improvement data regarding virtual visit volumes and clinical insights from our outpatient psychiatry department located within a large, urban, tertiary care academic medical center reflect both the opportunities and challenges of virtual care for patients and providers. Notable benefits have included robust clinical volumes despite social distancing mandates, reduced logistical barrieres to care for many patients, and decreased no-show rates. Finally, we provide clinical suggestions for optimizing telepsychiatry based on our experience, make a call for advocacy to continue the reduced insurance and regulatory restrictions affecting telepsychiatry even once this public health crisis has passed, and pose research questions that can help guide optimal utilization of telepsychiatry as mainstay or adjunct of outpatient psychiatric treatment now and in the future.

Keywords: Coronavirus/COVID-19; Mental health care/service delivery systems; Outpatient psychiatry; Quality improvement; Telepsychiatry.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest Dr. Chen is co-editor of Sociocultural Issues in Psychiatry: A Casebook and Curriculum, published March 2019, Oxford University Press, and has received payment for participation in an advisory panel for Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Dr. Wozniak is the author of the book, Is Your Child Bipolar? published May 2008, Bantam Books, and receives research support from Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and the Demarest Lloyd Jr. Foundation. Dr. Huffman receives salary contributions as a journal editor for Elsevier/General Hospital Psychiatry.

References

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