Month: July 2022

How to Effectively Incorporate Telepsychiatry Into Your Care Team

Expanding your team with remote providers benefits your on-site clinicians, patients, and organization overall. Whether you’ve already got a hybrid of on-site and remote providers working for your organization or you’re adding new virtual clinicians to your team, there are several tips and tricks that can help you along the way.

Keep reading to learn more about the benefits, common challenges, and recommendations for providers and organizations to help effectively integrate telepsychiatry into your care team.

What does a truly integrated remote and on-site team look like?

When your clinician team is technically, culturally, and logistically well-integrated, your remote providers will feel and operate like an extension of your on-site team.

So, what does true integration look like exactly? Culturally, this integration can include participating in care team meetings, joining clinical medical leadership discussions, invitations to conferences, social or outside-of-work team events, and even fun gatherings like happy hours. This inclusion can help providers feel more comfortable by allowing them to spend time with other clinicians on their team.

The technical and logistical aspects of provider integration are also crucial in building long-term partnerships. That’s what makes a meet and greet so essential. This process can help ensure a good match between the providers and clinic staff before bringing them onboard.

The benefits of effectively incorporating telepsychiatry into your organization

When remote care teams are integrated and work together smoothly, on-site providers, organizations, and patients can all benefit.

Here’s how:

Collaboration of care: The initial patient evaluation, typically an hour long, is the most commonly missed by patients. With remote providers to lean on, your patients will never miss out on care because they can’t make it to an on-site appointment.

Addressing specialty mental health needs: The main advantage of having remote behavioral health providers on your clinical team is managing a broader spectrum of behavioral health care needs. Having on-site and remote providers gives patients more options and opportunities to get the care they need. Your organization can learn how to seamlessly address mental health care in your space through collaboration and coordination of care. Telepsychiatry helps elevate collaboration even further by making specialty providers with specific mental health expertise readily available for organizations, on-site providers, and patients.

Increase in patient comfort: Many remote providers appreciate seeing a patient in their home environment as it can inform care and make the patient feel more comfortable. For patients with anxiety who aren’t comfortable leaving their houses, telepsychiatry can be a particularly beneficial option. In fact, 85.52% of patients report that telemedicine has made getting the care they need easier.

Solving common integration challenges

So, what happens if a remote provider doesn’t appear to be a good match with the organization? It’s natural that there might be initial challenges when bringing new providers onto your care team. At Iris Telehealth, we help with common integrations and ongoing relationship challenges by facilitating and guiding the communication between provider and organization.

Our teams are invested when the clinician is introduced to an organization and stay engaged throughout a provider’s service. By advocating and mediating for both organizations and providers, we ensure the relationship, and ultimately patient care, remain high-quality.

Additionally, we get ahead of potential challenges by ensuring the clinical match is right the first time. We call this process “provider matching.” Provider matching can be a great way to combat these common integration challenges. Furthermore, working with an organization that delivers proven provider matching services is invaluable to seamless integration. However, if things aren’t going smoothly logistically or culturally, we’re still there to help. We’re looking for long-term matches that will meet your needs and match you with the perfect provider for your team.

Communication tips and recommendations

Naturally, as teams integrate, remote and on-site providers might experience growing pains and need to settle into new workflows. However, knowing a few tips and tricks can set your organization up for success. Here are four ways to embrace remote providers and help them feel like a part of the team:

Clear communication: Communication is key for providers working in a remote setting. By figuring out how you’ll communicate with your remote colleague, you can provide the best care for your patients. Consider whether you’ll communicate through the EMR or video or audio-only calls. Additionally, knowing the frequency of communication can also help set expectations between providers.
Be upfront with expectations: Be sure to communicate expectations upfront. That way, everyone will know their role when the time comes to provide the best care possible for their patients. The best way to ensure seamless integration is to prepare the operational conversations about bringing in a new provider. This operational conversation can be in the form of an interview or a meet and greet, where the provider and clinical team can discuss practice philosophies, scheduling preferences, and other essential logistics. Additionally, you can discuss what types of patients your organization sees, how patients are managed, avenues of care, and anything else you want your remote provider to be aware of. If you’re an organization new to telepsychiatry and unsure what to ask, that’s okay! At Iris, we facilitate these conversations and work to ensure the clinical match is a good fit.
Regular meetings: You can facilitate team collaboration and integrated patient care by blocking time for meetings that include your remote provider. For example, some providers have meetings with their on-site teams where they can bounce ideas off each other and connect. Offering ways to collaborate outside of seeing patients is an excellent way for integrated teams to provide excellent care while getting to know each other.
Don’t treat remote providers as contractors: Remote and on-site providers have the same goals and work on the same team. Remote providers tend to be happier and stay longer when they can connect with other providers and feel included in their organization.

How Iris Can Help

At Iris, we match you with providers who can integrate seamlessly into your care team technically, culturally, and logistically. With nearly a decade of experience, we share our best practices and expertise. Iris can help you fill gaps in your behavioral health services, whether it’s therapy services or various in-patient or outpatient psychiatric care. One of our core values is people over all else and our providers and partners are no exception. If you’d like to learn more, contact us today.

Best Practices

How does the ED telepsychiatry process work?

Initiating a telepsychiatry consult is similar to calling any other consult in the ED. Here’s how it works:

Step one: A clinician evaluates the patient and determines whether or not they need a psychiatric consultation.

Step two: If they do, the clinician enters the essential information into a paging system. After that, an assistant in the ED takes a telehealth cart into the patient’s room.

Step three: From this point, the consult is nearly identical to a standard in-person consult. After the evaluation, the telepsychiatrist promptly calls a designated individual (such as a social worker) to discuss the basics of the patient’s presentation.

Step four: Next, the telepsychiatrist connects to the telehealth cart and speaks with the patient in real-time. The psychiatrist develops a treatment plan that typically includes a disposition and communicates this plan with the attending ED doctor.

Step five: Finally, the psychiatrist writes a note directly into an organization’s EMR, and the consultation is complete.

With five simple steps, telepsychiatry can facilitate a seamless process for providers, patients, and the organization at large.

Can telepsychiatry integrate within any health system?

One of the telepsychiatry benefits that’s helpful to organizations is how it can be seamlessly implemented into an organization’s existing equipment, including their EMR, prescribing system, and protocols for managing operations. At Iris Telehealth, we’ve found this is a crucial step to help minimize disruption. We act as a technology-neutral addition to an organization’s team by becoming familiar with and integrating into their existing systems and workflows. We ensure all staff are trained on best practices for using technology and are comfortable with it.

What type of equipment do health systems need for telepsychiatry?

The equipment required for telepsychiatry is relatively simple. The person-to-person nature of psychiatry makes it well-suited for telehealth. This perk is a central telepsychaitry benefit as there’s not much equipment needed beyond a computer.

If you already have equipment like telehealth carts, laptops, or tablets, you’re implementation will likely be seamless. Iris can implement within your current systems without any additional work and without your care team needing to learn new tools.

How long do we have to wait for the doctor?

In most cases, the wait is less than 30-minutes. That estimate includes the start of a consultation to the psychiatrist being at the patient’s bedside. Timing is essential in all areas of medicine, but it is critical within emergency telepsychiatry. For high-quality patient care, things must run efficiently to allow the timely delivery of services to your patients.

A good telepsychiatry partner should have systems in place to initiate a telepsychiatry consultation as quickly as possible. With an active and dynamic call pool of dedicated psychiatrists or other appropriate behavioral health providers (including LCSWs and PMHNPs), organizations can ensure a system that consistently puts a provider at the patient’s bedside in under 30-minutes.

What makes for a successful ED telepsychiatry program?

Cultural fit can make a significant difference in the success of your emergency telepsychiatry program. That’s why it’s essential to partner with a telepsychiatry vendor who aligns with your vision and values. This compatibility is vital at every level, from the leadership team to clinicians.

In fact, at Iris, we’ve discovered that provider match is essential to the success of a telepsychiatry program. Our process connects healthcare organizations with providers, thoughtfully, based on experience and need. This process allows us to ensure an organization’s population get’s the specialty care they need. It also allows providers to work within their specializations – allowing everyone to get the most value.

Telepsychiatry groups are only as good as their providers. We work with the best psychiatrists, PMHNPs, and LCSWs in the field. Our providers learn the needs and goals of an organization’s ED. Over time, we’ve found that our providers can build authentic relationships with an organization’s staff and truly become integrated members of their treatment team.

Get started with ED telepsychiatry today

At Iris, we ensure your ED is set up for success and help facilitate an implementation process that’s smooth and straightforward. Once complete, your patients will have 24/7 access to a behavioral health provider. Most importantly, they’ll spend less time in the ED waiting for care.

Telepsychiatry benefits the entire organization. It is a powerful platform that delivers quick access to the high-quality care patients need when they need it – whether at home, in an outpatient clinic, or a hospital.

If you would like to learn more about how you can optimize your behavioral health strategy in the ED, contact us today.

Clinician Resources

Clinician Corner: Meet Dr. Chris Heh, MD

Iris clinicians are at the heart of what makes our organization such a special place to work. That’s why we’re turning the spotlight on the amazing work they’re doing every day. This month, we’re sitting down to talk with Dr. Chris Heh.

Q. How did you find Iris and decide you wanted to be an Iris provider?

A: Six years ago, I was making a job transition and was looking for something that would provide me with flexibility. I saw Iris’s website, which was user-friendly, creative, and well designed. I called them up, and we met. They said I would be a good fit for the team. They were good people, and I decided to start working with them.

Q. What does a typical day as an Iris Telehealth provider look like for you?

A: It’s quite variable, and it all depends on what type of work you’re doing. I’ve been with Iris for about six years, and I’ve had the ability to work in various areas of psychiatry. For example, I worked for an inpatient eating disorder unit for children and adolescents, for a geriatric inpatient psychiatric service, and now I do consultation-liaison work. It’s hard to say what a typical day looks like because each setting looks different.

I’ve worked in community mental health on an outpatient basis, too. In general, in the inpatient or consultation-liaisons service, you move from one patient to another. With telepsychiatry, you don’t have to walk up and down the hallways, the patients usually just pop up on your screen, which makes it very convenient. We have lots of support. For example, our clinical managers make the appointments and make the phone calls so we can see the patients. There’s a great deal of ease in seeing patients. A typical day is what you’d expect if you are in person, in some sense, except that we do it via televideo visits.

Q. What do you love about being a telepsychiatry provider?

A: It’s not just what I love about being a provider, but what I love about working with Iris. One of the things I love is that I’m able to move through different facets of psychiatry, everything from the eating disorders unit for children and adolescents to inpatient psychiatry to community mental health. The breadth of psychiatry is just amazing. I can see an assortment of patients in very different settings. For someone who likes variety like me, that’s great.

In general psychiatry, they always say time is priceless. I don’t have to spend 15-minutes grooming, getting my lab coat on, taking 30-minutes to drive to the hospital, or maybe taking five minutes walking around the unit trying to locate each patient. You save a lot of time, and you don’t realize it. If you think about it, it’s maybe two hours a day. You multiply that two hours times five days a week, that’s 10 hours, and I can use those 10 hours to do something more fun.

Q. How do you foster connection with patients virtually?

A: It’s really important to make time and adjust your approach to effectively build that connection when you’re a telehealth provider. And that’s especially important with kids. If you talk to children in a monotone voice, if you’re expressionless, they’re going to turn you off just like a bad tv show. You have to put your game face on, you have to be animated, you have to change the pitch of your voice, and the cadence of your speech, so it’s a little different. Since you’re not in person you have to be more animated. That’s how I try to keep my patients engaged.

Q. As a healthcare professional, how do you manage work-life balance?

A: It’s actually easier in some sense doing telepsychiatry. I have more free time. I think work-life balance depends on the person. I tend to be a workaholic. So when Iris says they have extra consults available, I usually take a look. However, when other Iris clinicians are too busy or have to take time off, Iris respects that, too.

I think work-life balance comes down to the person and what they want. It’s always a struggle, and you never think you got it right. It’s an infinite balancing act.

I was doing doubles, and the people at Iris were compassionate and asked, “Is that what you really want to do?” They worry about you getting burned out, and sometimes you need to be reminded. And I appreciate that. They always say, “Hey, thanks for working so hard, but are you working too hard?” That tells you they care about you.

Q. What are your biggest learnings from your time at Iris?

A: One of the nice things is I’ve been able to see patients in California, Texas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and so on. You think psychiatry is the same wherever you go, but it’s not. You have regional differences, county differences, and neighborhood differences. Your standard in one neighborhood may be different in another city or state. It’s interesting just to see the commitment laws throughout the United States are different, too. That makes it interesting and challenging.

Seeing how other people in other parts of the country treat their patients versus in your hometown is fascinating. Some of that you can carry over to other settings and say, “Hey, look, we do it this way over here. Have you thought about that?” Some people sometimes stay in a position for 30 years in the same old palace. Well, telepsychiatry is different. I can practice in five different states, in five different ways, and I find that very enriching.

Q. What is the most rewarding part of your job?

A: There are many aspects. One is the patients themselves. There are some areas where psychiatry is so desolate, and they just don’t have enough psychiatric care. And, when you meet some patients, and you get feedback from them, they say, “Hey, thanks for spending time.” I find it very satisfying because Iris reaches out to these communities where psychiatric care is minimal and unavailable.

Iris has done a very good job of picking the right people for the right positions. When you’re working with other people of the same caliber and excellence, that makes your job so enjoyable. When you’ve got colleagues you can depend on and colleagues who also have a high standard of care, they make you better. I think having good people to work with and people who are just as competent, if not more competent, sharpens you and allows you to grow.

Q. What do you love about working with Iris?

A: There are so many aspects. Number one, reimbursement is fair, and that’s important. There are always ways to increase your income. I think the flexibility in the scheduling is very good, and there are various shifts you can take. The other thing I like is that they have very responsive management. You have people who look at you as a person, and not someone who is just a simple cog in the wheel who can be replaced. They appreciate you, and you can sense and feel that. You’re not just treated like a number. I’ve had a nomadic life in psychiatry. I’ve moved around a lot. I’ve been with Iris for six years. For me, to stick with anybody for six years is unusual. So, they must be doing something right.

Q. Why do you think telepsychiatry is important to the future of mental healthcare?

A: First and foremost, telepsychiatry is important because there are just certain areas in the United States where psychiatric care is desolate. For remote areas, it is essential because patients aren’t going to drive 20 miles to see a psychiatry provider. I think it is really important in those areas where there’s a lack of care. They need psychiatric providers. The other thing is to get a psychiatrist at midnight to come into your emergency room – who will do that? There aren’t too many. If there are, they don’t last too long.

Telepsychiatry is here to say, and it’s simply because there aren’t enough physicians or psychiatrists. From a treatment standpoint, it provides care instantaneously, when you need it, like in the middle of the night when there’s no one around. I’m glad it’s there because you need professionals when no one else is around during those critical times. Telepsychiatry has been growing and growing, and I don’t see it going away.

At Iris, we believe our providers should be respected, valued, and applauded for the work they do, and we couldn’t be more proud to say, “thank you” to our very own Chris Heh. If you’d like to learn more about working for Iris Telehealth, contact us today.

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