Mental Health and Human Resilience

The growing need for Behavior Health Care Services along with the shortage of providers makes for a significant challenge. The continued rise of healthcare costs has left us with the challenge of how we can deliver behavioral health care services in the medical setting while decreasing the cost, improving efficiency, having a more patient centered approach, and elevating the standard of care. This pilot consists of a joint effort of a multi-disciplinary team: nurses, hospitalist, psychiatrist and social worker. The target population was patients admitted to the Florida Hospital Orlando System under an involuntary commitment, had significant medical conditions that warrants admission to the medical floors, i.e. uncontrolled diabetes, uncontrolled hypertension and chest pains. While these patients were receiving active medical treatment waiting to be stabilized, a multidiscipline psychiatric team provided active treatment for these patients via telemedicine the outcome was 78% of the patients admitted to this new pilot model did not require acute psychiatric hospitalization and they were able to be discharge back into the community with outpatient follow. Both the medical and psychiatric treatments were able to be provided in parallel manner. This Virtual Inpatient Psychiatric unit is an example of future models of care that with the incorporation of telemedicine will improve our response time, increase the access and a more patient centered approach to care.