Adventures in telepsychiatry

A few weeks ago, another psychiatrist sent me a copy of the informed consent form he uses with his patients, just so I could compare his form with mine.

His wording was different, of course, but he did have some really good ideas that I hadn’t thought to include in my own, so I thought I would blog about them and adapt my own form to incorporate some of his good ideas.

• He gets permission to take a still picture of the patient for identification purposes. I’m not going to do that, because my policy is to see the patient face-to-face for the first visit. I know what he’s getting at though, and I’ll have to think about it a bit more. Is recognising the patient on video the same as recognising him or her face-to-face?
• He makes it much more explicit that the patient needs to be responsible for privacy of communication at the patient’s end of things. I’m going to put in a few more sentences in my consent form when I get the chance.
• He explicitly says “I’m not going to look for instant messages from you on Skype except during sessions.” I need to put this in my form, too. I’ve had one miscommunication happen because someone must have assumed that I monitor Skype instant messages all the time, and I don’t.
• He’s a little more explicit about how the patient should try to continue calling via Skype if he or she can’t get through at the beginning of the session, in case he’s running over with the previous patient.
• Finally, he says that he reserves the right to do some simple testing to make sure that the patient can see him at the beginning of the session. That’s a good idea. I’m not sure that has to go in a consent form, but the principle makes me think that I ought to make a few more notes about the technical aspects of the telepsychiatry session than I’m currently doing.