Novel Approaches to Clinical Care in Mental Health: From Asynchronous Telepsychiatry to Virtual Reality
Many new technological innovations are currently in use or under development to ensure the effectiveness of convenient care. This chapter will focus on reviewing some ways to enhance the quality of clinical care in mental health through technology innovat
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Novel Approaches to Clinical Care in Mental Health: From Asynchronous Telepsychiatry to Virtual Reality Abdullah Maghazil and Peter Yellowlees
This chapter is divided into 5 main sections. The first part is an introduction to the process of patient consultations, and how the process of these consultations can be redesigned to make it work more effectively with a range of technologies and devices. We provide some guidelines for providers to enable them to focus their direct services on more important tasks than routine work, which can often be done using a range of technologies. The second part reviews a number of technologies that are changing the way we communicate whether in our daily lives or in our healthcare practices, particularly smartphones, tablets and a range of medical devices intended for use at home. The third part is designed to focus on synchronous or real-time Telepsychiatry, which encompasses live and interactive communication between the patient and the provider for diagnosis, analysis, and data collection. The fourth part reviews Asynchronous or Store & Forward Telepsychiatry, a clinical process that we have pioneered and which we believe will become very common in future. Asynchronous medicine is the transmission of medical information from the patient to the provider, or vice versa, over a distance, with a review of the information later on. The information is literally ‘‘stored and forwarded’’ and viewed asynchronously. This is similar to sending a lab test result or an x-ray image to the doctor who then reviews the results whenever they have time available to provide suggestions or treatment. The final section will focus on the future, and in particular on the use of virtual reality in mental health.
A. Maghazil Health Informatics Graduate Program, UC Davis Medical Center, Sacramento, USA P. Yellowlees (&) Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California-Davis, Sacramento, CA, USA
M. Lech et al. (eds.), Mental Health Informatics, Studies in Computational Intelligence 491, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-38550-6_4, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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A. Maghazil and P. Yellowlees
4.1 New Approaches to Care: The Underlying Principals In any actual doctor/patient consultation, we know that across multiple different specialties about 80 % of all consultations that any doctor has with any patient about any type of problem are generally straightforward. The patient has got a fairly clear set of symptoms. The doctor is able to make the diagnosis fairly easily. There is no need for specialist referral or multiple lab or radiology tests. The consultation tends to be short and the patient does not need to return for substantial follow up. The whole interaction is reasonably straightforward, and the patient’s symptoms or signs do not deviate from what is often called a ‘‘classical presentation’’. The 80/20 rule is a concept that essentially means about 20 % of the patients that doctors see take up about 80 % of resources. These are the people who have chronic illnesse
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