Teletherapy with serious mental illness populations during COVID-19: telehealth conversion and engagement
Teletherapy with serious mental illness populations during COVID-19: telehealth conversion and engagement
复制标题
DOI：
10.1080/09515070.2020.1791800
复制
发表时间：
2020-07-13
影响因子：
3
通讯作者：
Robinson, Reed J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Miu, Adriana S.;Vo, Hoa T.;Robinson, Reed J.
新冠肺炎大流行彻底改变了人们的日常生活和心理治疗临床操作。与严重精神疾病(SMI)人群的治疗接触本身就具有挑战性。由于远程医疗的快速变化和症状的恶化，新冠肺炎可能会给与重度心肌梗死人群的治疗接触带来更多挑战。在新冠肺炎期间，与非重度心肌梗死患者相比，重度心肌梗死患者转换为远程医疗或继续接受治疗的可能性可能较小。然而，在这场紧张的大流行中，通过远程治疗参与治疗对于支持脆弱的SMI人群至关重要。在这项研究中，我们比较了精神分裂症患者和普通人群在新冠肺炎期间的远程治疗转换率和使用率。我们发现SMI患者(52%)和非SMI患者(48%)的远程医疗转换没有差异，这表明SMI和非SMI人群采用了同等的远程治疗。除了转换，我们发现SMI组与非SMI患者相比，远程治疗的次数明显更多，这表明SMI组在转换后定期使用远程治疗。在通过远程医疗开始治疗的新患者中，没有组内差异，这表明SMI组并没有更多地寻求帮助。我们的研究结果表明，在大流行期间对严重精神疾病人群进行远程保健是可行的。
The COVID-19 pandemic completely changed daily lives and psychotherapy clinical operations. Treatment engagement with serious mental illness (SMI) populations is inherently challenging. COVID-19 may pose more challenges to treatment engagement with SMI populations due to the rapid change to telehealth and exacerbation of symptoms. SMI patients may be less likely to convert to telehealth or stay engaged in treatment compared to non-SMI patients during COVID-19. Nevertheless, treatment engagement via teletherapy is vital to supporting the vulnerable SMI populations during this stressful pandemic. In this study, we compared teletherapy conversion and utilization rates between SMI and general populations in an outpatient psychiatric clinic (n = 816) during COVID-19. We found no differences in telehealth conversion for patients with SMI (52%) and non-SMI (48%), suggesting equivalent adoption of teletherapy among SMI and non-SMI populations. Beyond conversion, we found that the SMI group had a significantly greater number of teletherapy visits compared to non-SMI patients, indicating that SMI group utilized teletherapy regularly after conversion. There were no group differences in new patients beginning therapy via telehealth, which shows that the SMI group was not more deterred to seek help. Our findings inform the feasibility of telehealth for serious mental illness populations during the pandemic.