The Need to Integrate Telehealth Technologies

Telehealth and other digital tools have eased the burden of work on mental health clinicians and expanded access to care. Still, there’s work to be done, says Psych Congress Network Telehealth Section Editor Steven Chan, MD, MBA, clinical assistant professor, Stanford University School of Medicine.

In this video taken at Psych Congress 2022, Dr Chan explains the concept of “data interoperability” and why its implementation is essential to the continuation and expansion of provided mental health care remotely.

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Read the Transcript:

Steven Chan, MD, MBA: I myself am a huge techie. I love computers, I love using technology, and there are so many more options we can use to diagnose and treat patients. Telehealth is one area of technologies, we've seen electronic health records, we've seen mobile apps, and now digital therapeutics. So we're seeing a lot of digital options to treat patients, and I think that it's something that's here to stay, but there's still some more room for improvement.

A lot of these technologies don't talk with each other. Can you imagine, why do we need to take a phone number from an electronic medical record system and manually enter it into a phone? That's the kind of analogy I think of when I think, well, why can't a technology just allow me to click to call to make that a simple process?

So a lot of these components are not necessarily integrated. We call this data interoperability or data sharing, and that's going to be one of the most important things that we need to figure out. How do we get a unified, say, electronic health record platform that can have all these pieces plugged in while not having us use Windows 95 era interfaces from decades ago? So there's a lot of work to be done in the areas of usability, user interfaces, making the design nice and easy to use to make not just patients' lives easier, but also the clinicians' lives so we can reduce a lot of the clinical burnout.

There are some groups even, the American Medical Informatics Association, or AMIA, that are working on improving these technologies. They have an initiative called the 25x5 initiative to reduce documentation burden, all that documentation that's required and takes up a lot of time for clinicians and burns clinicians out. So the hope is that more and more are involved, and their goal is to reduce documentation burden by 25% by 2025. So it's something to check out.

There's a lot that can be done to improve these technologies, certainly, but it's an exciting time. We're seeing the promise of these technologies come to fruition, but there's more room for improvement.

Steven Chan (@StevenChanMD, www.stevenchanMD.com) is an actively-practicing physician at Palo Alto VA Health, specializing in psychiatry, clinical informatics, and healthcare technology. Dr Chan performs clinical research in areas of telehealth and digital mental health, with applications in underserved and minority health. Dr. Chan is a sought-after national speaker whose ideas, thoughts, and research have been featured by Talks At Google, JAMA, Telemedicine and e-Health, Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), Wired, PBS, and NPR Ideastream.