Adventures in telepsychiatry

It’s surprising how few technical difficulties my patients have had with Skype, but there have been a few.

With one exception, all the technical troubles any of my patients have encountered have been the very first time that they’ve set up Skype. Although I tell everyone to test it out before they try it for their first appointment, the problem is that some of the people I see don’t know anyone to Skype with other than me. It’s hard to test the system without someone else to help.

I’ve tried to address the problem by now asking people to make one quick Skype call to me before their first appointment if they can’t test things with someone else. Although this wastes a little of my time occasionally, it really hasn’t been that much of a burden (I’ve done this two or three times,  and it never took more than 10 minutes to get everything working.)

The one exception was a problem that turned out to be really hard to fix. My patient had borrowed one of my loaner webcams, got this webcam to work without a problem, and then decided to buy a new webcam for himself. He installed the software for the new webcam, but it wouldn’t work. He did try to call me, but Skype wasn’t working at all. We did the session by regular phone after it was clear that something was wrong and after we had wasted about 10 minutes trying to fix it.

The problem was that he had not de-installed the software from the loaner webcam before installing the software from the new webcam, and that messed up everything until he uninstalled both sets of software (complete with the usual 10 reboots it tends to take Windows to do these things) and re-installed the software for the new webcam.

I’ve actually only had one video call go south in the middle of the session–the person was in a place with a lot of electronics, and I suspect that the problem was on her end, not on mine, but I guess you never know.

So, the score right now is one failed session and 30 minutes of “technical support” time in what have to be 100+ sessions, at least. Not too bad in my opinion. I probably spend as much time keeping my printer working.