Sally Whittle, Guardian Professional
“Over the past decade, the number of patients presenting with anxiety and depression has increased steadily, and the current recession has done little to help.
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Hoekstra R. Tijdschrift Voor Psychiatrie, 53(10)
Background
The internet used to be mainly ‘one-way traffic’ (1.0). Nowadays it is becoming easy for internet users to communicate with each other via the web (2.0).
Aim
To describe the concept of Health 2.0 and to explore the possibilities of 2.0-technology for psychiatry.
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CMIO
“Coupling an electronic prescription drug ordering system with a computerized method for reporting adverse events can dramatically reduce the number of medication errors in a hospital’s psychiatric unit, according to research published in the March edition of The Journal of Psychiatric Practice.
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Sarah Bruce, e-Health Insider
“Medium and high-risk psychiatric patients at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust are being tagged with satellite tracking devices.
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“Practice Fusion announces today the release of a fully-integrated module specific to psychiatry in an expansion of its free, web-based Electronic Medical Record system. Mental health providers can effectively run an entire practice from one free, secure application and qualify themselves for federal EMR stimulus money.
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Aguitarte, Somos Medicina
“Internet no podía sólo ser fuente de problemas psiquiátricos, también puede emplearse en el tratamiento de diferentes trastornos mentales.
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Medical News Today
“Obtaining therapy via teleconference is just as effective as face-to-face sessions, according to a new research by Stephane Guay, a psychiatry professor at the Universite de Montreal.
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Bickmore, Timothy, and Amanda Gruber, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 18(2)
Relational agents are computational artifacts, such as animated, screen-based characters or social robots, that are designed to establish a sense of rapport, trust, and even therapeutic alliance with patients, using ideal therapeutic relationships between human counselors and patients as role models. We describe the development and evaluation of several such agents designed for health counseling and behavioral-change interventions, in which a therapeutic alliance is established with patients in order to enhance the efficacy of the intervention.
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Clinton, Brian K. et al, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 18(2)
With the growth of the Internet, psychiatrists can now search online for a wide range of information about patients. Psychiatrists face challenges of maintaining professional boundaries with patients in many circumstances, but little consideration has been given to the practice of searching online for information about patients, an act we refer to as patient-targeted Googling (PTG). Psychiatrists are not the only health care providers who can investigate their patients online, but they may be especially likely to engage in PTG because of the unique relationships involved in their clinical practice. Before searching online for a patient, psychiatrists should consider such factors as the intention of searching, the anticipated effect of gaining information online, and its potential value or risk for the treatment.
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Yellowlees, Peter, and Najia Nafi, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 18(2)
The core doctor-patient relationship is changing and becoming more fluid. Many factors are causing the changes, but they are being underpinned by the current technological revolution, which has spawned terms such as e-patients, health 2.0, participatory medicine, and virtual medicine in cyberspace. The Internet is being used so creatively and commonly by both patients and doctors that it has become literally a “part” of the doctor-patient relationship. To explore how the psychiatrist-patient relationship is changing, five simple questions are examined: How are patient expectations and behaviors changing? Who is using the Internet for mental health care?
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Luo, John, Psychiatric Times, 27(2)
In today’s practice of medicine, it is highly unlikely that any physician entering into or already in practice will remain in the analog age without some type of health information technology. Computers today are just as important to the psychiatric office as was the proverbial couch, and they play a central role in data collection, storage, and retrieval in various domains such as scheduling, billing, and record keeping.
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Patrick Barta, Adventures in telepsychiatry
“Psychiatric Times has a recent article on using the Internet to connect with patients.
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Seeman, Mary V. et al, Psychiatric Times, 27(2)
E-mail, instant messaging (IM), video chat, and social networks—notably blogs and online communities such as Facebook and Twitter—have emerged as essential business and social communication tools. Electronic communication is speedy and efficient, crossing continents in seconds (e-mail) or, in some cases, nanoseconds (as with Google Wave and Skype technologies).
In this age of social media, even basic e-mail exchanges are already verging on obsolescence for people under age 30. More young people now use Twitter than e-mail. But whether messages are conveyed by e-mail or Twitter or Facebook, the advantage in patient-doctor exchanges is that they all originate at times convenient to the sender and recipient; appropriate phrasing can be thoughtfully chosen; concerns can be reflected on; and decisions can be considered before being uttered. Standard answers and qualifications to commonly asked questions can be composed in advance, which saves time and trouble for physicians.
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Sarah Kearns, HealthLeaders Media
“When a new patient enters a hospital, staff members generally follow the same routine. The admitting nurse asks the patient’s name, date of birth, symptoms, and any allergies to any medications. From this information, a medical record is created and the patient may be admitted and is taken to a room.
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