Best Practices for Prescribing Long-Acting Injectable Medications Via Telehealth

In today’s evolving healthcare landscape, telehealth has become a vital tool for psychiatric care, offering flexibility and increased access for patients regardless of location. In this video, Desiree Matthews, PMHNP-BC, CEO, Different MHP, highlights how mental health care providers can seamlessly integrate medication management into their virtual practices—especially for patients needing long-acting injectable (LAI) antipsychotics.

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Desiree Matthews, PMHNP-BC: Hello, my name is Desiree Matthews and I'm a psychiatric nurse practitioner. I work at a community mental health center out of Charlotte, North Carolina.

When it comes to telehealth and seeing patients utilizing telehealth technology, it is very possible to make changes to treatment plans and start new medications, in particular for those who are seeing patients who would be a good candidate for a long-acting injectable antipsychotic. Certainly, we can prescribe those medications just as we would with anybody that we're seeing face-to-face. However, the big difference is in your operation.

Operationally, think about how is that person going to get the long-acting injectable? We can't physically get to them because we might be working states away. So, that's where setting up a network of, say, pharmacist injectors comes in. In many states pharmacists can now actually give long-acting injectable antipsychotics. Working with your pharmacy partners in rural areas where maybe there is not a pharmacy injector or that state is not allowing that at this time due to the law, working with primary care doctors and actually allowing the patients to come into the primary care setting, receive the injection by somebody that is trained, and really coordinating care with that rural primary care doctor.

In my practice, we also have our brick-and-mortar offices where patients can come in, see me via telehealth onsite, and then right after receive their injection from a trained nurse or trained injector who is able to give the medication. So, it really depends on your state, it’s going to depend on the support, if you have that brick-and-mortar. But again, if you don't, those pharmacy injectors as well as partnering with primary care would be a really great opportunity to make sure that patients are able to get the ais and receive them conveniently.

Thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you next time.

Desiree Matthews, PMHNP-BC, is a board certified psychiatric nurse practitioner with expertise in treating patients living with severe mental illness. Beyond clinical practice, Desiree has provided leadership in advocating for optimal outcomes of patients and elevating healthcare provider education. Desiree is the founder and owner of Different MHP, a telepsychiatry practice founded with the mission of providing affordable, accessible precision focused, integrative psychiatry to patients through a rich and comprehensive mentorship of the health care providers within the company.