Technology & Psychiatry

Telepsychiatry often involves the working together of clinicians, patients, and organizations that are both geographically and culturally distinct. Thus, culturally appropriate care is an important component of telepsychiatry.

The need for better tools, as well as better use of existing tools, to measure treatment response in clinical trials was a principle focus of the 46th annual NIMH-sponsored NCDEU (New Clinical Drug Evaluation Unit) meeting, held June 12-15 in Boca Raton, Fla. Improved clinical research techniques are needed to better separate treatment effect from placebo response, to distinguish between active comparators, and to facilitate development of novel treatments, according to several presenters at the conference.

Telepsychiatry has been hailed as the future of psychiatry. Proponents have claimed that it can reduce costs and allow access to difficult-to-reach patients. What are the promises and pitfalls of this new technology?

Given that passion, opinion, opportunism and inertia have shaped much of managed care's evolution, there is an increasing need for the systematic gathering and rational application of facts. Outcome evaluations and insights into what facilitates and what impedes efficient and effective care are now avidly sought, not only for improving care delivery and treatment effectiveness but also for regulatory functions and commercial promotion.

In more than two dozen programs throughout the United States, telepsychiatry is ushering in a new way of bringing mental health services to thousands of individuals who, in the past, may have gone without. More often than not, however, they are pilot projects or grant-supported endeavors, meaning that these prototypes of the psychiatrist's office of the future have yet to prove themselves in the medical marketplace.