Adventures in telepsychiatry

I’m not exactly sure when the State of Maryland is going to enact regulations for telepsychiatry, but I’ve finally put together a basic informed consent form for telepsychiatry for my practice.

I tried to write it in fairly plain English, unlike my HIPAA form , which is so complicated that I don’t really understand half of what it says.

Although I agonized over this informed consent form for a while, I realized that much of it was fairly straightforward. Many of the risks were technical, the benefit was mostly convenience, and the alternative to telepsychiatry was to do what I’ve been doing.

However, I did put in some language covering specific situations, because I’ve thought about certain potential problems:

• I can’t necessarily get the same information that I would get if the patient and I were face-to-face.
• Emergency care might be harder via telepsychiatry.
• Either the patient or I can call it quits if either of us doesn’t think it is working well.
• Neither of us can make recordings of the session.
• Both of us have to know if there is a potential for anyone else to hear our conversation.

I’m sure that I’ll modify this form as time goes on, but at least it’s a start.