Over the past two decades, many smartphone users have taken advantage of technology to interact with friends and family and to hold brief meetings for their jobs. With the introduction of video conferencing, individuals and groups in different cities, states or countries are able to participate in the same meeting. Many of us have become more familiar with FaceTime and Zoom as ways to see and interact with our families and friends rather than just speaking with them on the phone.
The concept of meeting virtually is not limited to personal or business relationships. It has started to become a terrific option for meetings between healthcare providers and their patients, especially in the field of behavioral health.
What is telehealth?
"Telehealth" is the umbrella term for virtual healthcare. Telehealth sessions use of a phone, smartphone, tablet or computer to connect a patient with a clinician for medical advice. It is a beneficial tool when distance or a medical condition is preventing a patient from seeing a provider in person at an office.
How the COVID crisis impacted telehealth
During the pandemic, telehealth visits became an appealing option for patients with basic health questions who were unable to see their providers in person. Now, telehealth offers many providers an opportunity to meet virtually with their patients.
Telehealth for behavioral health
Virtual behavioral healthcare combines telehealth technologies with behavioral health practices to deliver care to patients who need it but are unable to visit a therapist or counselor in person for any reason. This is a change from our training, as most traditional behavioral health education programs emphasize the importance of building in-person relationships with patients.
This change, however, comes with exciting new opportunities for mental health clinicians to develop and learn the best interventions and how to engage in therapy through technology.
The benefits of virtual behavioral health
Virtual behavioral health provides two distinct opportunities: the ability to continue providing care to our patients when they're unable to come to us and the removal of some barriers to access that people who needed mental health support may have been unable to overcome previously.
While the benefits of in-person therapeutic relationships are still incredibly important, the option for telehealth has allowed us to maintain some level of care and therapy for our patients. When care must be continued but cannot happen in person, this provides an excellent alternative.
Telehealth also allows us to engage with patients who typically would struggle to get to appointments. Barriers such as transportation issues, health conditions, or socio-economic limitations are removed through telemedicine, allowing for more interactions between provider and patient.
Early research has shown that telehealth can be an invaluable option for the treatment of mental health concerns.
The downside of virtual behavioral health
Unfortunately, along with the benefits are some negatives.
- As mental health clinicians, we rely on the therapeutic relationship to build trust, to have patients share information, to share a smile, or pay attention to non-verbal cues. With telehealth we sometimes lose those moments to learn from each other as it is different speaking to someone on a screen rather than sitting in your office.
- In an office, there is a better sense of privacy. Many patients may have others in the home, and privacy can become a concern when using telehealth.
- Having adequate technology plays such an important role in video telehealth. At times it can create a new barrier if the patient does not have the latest technology due to old computers or phones, or poor or no internet connections.
- Age can be a barrier if patients don’t know how to use video platforms such as Facetime, Skype or Zoom. The very young will not have the patience to sit at a screen while a clinician asks questions, though they may have a little more patience when sitting in the office just knowing that the lollipop is waiting at the end of the checkup.
How Bradley Hospital is leading the way in virtual behavioral healthcare
During the pandemic, clinicians at Bradley Hospital knew we had to continue to provide care to our patients, but understood the risks involved with in-person meetings. We developed a new way to approach behavioral healthcare for children and adolescents, combining our decades of clinical practice with a variety of available telehealth options and created Bradley REACH.
Having provided virtual behavioral health services for the past four years, we have come to learn through extensive data collection that telemedicine does, in fact, work. When teens and families participate in our programs, we ask them to complete a variety of questionnaires that determine progress. A large majority of our teens and families participating in the REACH virtual program report just as much, if not slightly higher, rates of improvement when compared to our in-person programs.
By adding REACH to our extensive list of services, we have been able to provide intensive behavioral health services to more teens, admissions have been timelier, and as designed, we have been able to provide treatment to more teens who live further from our hospital in East Providence. Families who have participated in REACH because they were unable to attend in-person sessions, due to transportation issues or living further away in Massachusetts, Connecticut, or even Florida, have told us how they appreciate that we can now offer treatment without a major barrier of location.
New telehealth opportunities for the future
If there was a positive outcome to the coronavirus, it is that telehealth is presenting us with new opportunities that will eventually benefit both patients and providers.
- Not all behavioral health and medical concerns can be discussed over the phone or a video platform. But rather than having to go to the doctor’s office for multiple visits, some visits may be in-person and others through telehealth.
- While surgery will never be performed via a telehealth platform, perhaps in the future the doctor can do his pre- and post-operative meetings with the patient using telehealth.
- There will be new opportunities for states and insurance companies to have more conversations about how telehealth can work and to start to address the restrictions that have been in place. When traveling to an appointment is a hardship for a patient, telehealth offers an office visit without the travel. For areas where there is little or no available medical or behavioral health services, individuals will be able to secure a provider even if they are hundreds of miles away.
While in-person care will always be around and often preferred, telehealth has a role in expanding services—this is just the beginning of what the future may look hold. We look forward to our ongoing efforts to provide much needed treatment to teens and families throughout the United States.
To learn more about the REACH program, visit the Bradley REACH website.
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