Over the weekend, I decided to switch to Google Voice. I put messages on all my phones (my cell, my practice office and my office at Hopkins) directing people to call me on my Google Voice number and have started the process of letting everyone like my bank and others know that my number has [...]
Also tagged email, Google Voice, Skype hours, voicemailI mentioned in my last post that I wasn’t recording any of my Skype sessions with patients. The reason is not the simple knee-jerk reaction of “protecting the patient’s privacy” but something else. The fact is, the privacy issue isn’t that hard to address. Lots of medical information is encrypted and encryption is the key [...]
Also tagged digital records, HIPAA, privacy, recordingMany years ago, I was attending an administrative meeting for clinical matters. As was the norm for these meetings, the leader of the meeting was going through new requirements for yet more senseless documentation. The intent was good, but everyone in the room (including the leader) knew that the need for increased record keeping wasn’t [...]
Also tagged consent form, digital records, documentation, informed consent, medical records, privacy, recordingOne problem I still haven’t solved to my satisfaction is a good way to use Skype for telepsychiatry and take notes at the same time. If you just have paper records, then this issue isn’t problematic-—you use the computer monitor for Skype, and your regular paper notes. However, my record keeping system is on line, [...]
Also tagged computer monitor, dokuwiki, EMR, medical recordsI mentioned in my Getting started with Skype for patients post that I was going to go out on Black Friday to see if I could find a couple of inexpensive webcams that I could lend out for patients to try. I wanting to make sure that if a webcam never came back, I wouldn’t [...]
Also tagged inexpensive, webcamI rent office space for my practice, and I’m not there some of the time (I usually work in my practice on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and in my other job on the other days). The office just sits there empty five out of seven days of the week, and I’ve often thought about how I [...]
Also tagged emergencies, face-to-face, home office, office spaceIn “Telepsychiatry: What’s lost?, Part one,” I said that one advantage of a face-to-face visit over telepsychiatry was that some of the visual information gets lost through a webcam. When I’m face to face with someone, I can take a quick glance at their hands and look for a tremor. I can’t do that with [...]
Also tagged face tracking, face-to-face, ubuntu“The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.1“ A couple of days ago, I was doing a Skype session with someone and the video cut out suddenly, so we had to reconnect halfway through the session. As the connection was failing, [...]
Also tagged advantages, dropped callSkype gives you a little image of yourself to look at while you’re talking to someone. I noticed that, no matter how I adjusted the room lights, there was some glare off my glasses, often much worse than the picture below. Before, with old glasses: I realized that what happens is that the computer monitor [...]
Also tagged eyeglass glare, rapportI haven’t done exhaustive testing yet, but I do have two webcams from Logitech, and both seem to do the job for telepsychiatry. The first of these is the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 which retails for $76.99 at Amazon right now. I have this camera on my computer in my office. The video quality on [...]
Also tagged eye contact, logitech, webcam
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