One possibility psychologists might consider is establishing partnerships with local community organizations or other spaces that offer private, centralized, and clean spaces for clients to attend sessions, such as libraries, medical centers, community colleges, or courthouses,” Batastini says.īut concerns about the privacy and security of tele-psychology are not limited to the patient’s side of the screen. “For vulnerable or underserved clients, this task may prove more difficult.
She emphasizes the importance of improving all patients’ access to the internet and to private spaces, which are both crucial for the success of virtual interventions or assessments. “What we know is certainly promising, but we need more scientifically rigorous studies and a better understanding of what works and for whom,” she says. Ensuring quality, security, and privacyīatastini does have a word of caution for those “hailing telepsychology as the key to improving access to care.” While her team’s study had a compelling conclusion, it also revealed some significant limitations in the existing literature on tele-psychology-namely, inconsistent quality across studies. “I think telepsychology is here to stay, and it’s important for us to adapt, not resist,” she says. (Batastini and her colleagues did uncover one interesting surprise in the new study: Women appear to have better outcomes following virtual interventions than in-person interventions, something that merits further research, she says.)īatastini hopes that this study will help assuage lingering concerns that psychologists may have about the impact of virtual delivery on their services. She says their conclusions were in line with the existing literature on telepsychology, including a 2016 meta-analysis by the same team that focused on correctional and forensic telepsychology. The result was not a surprise to Batastini and her team. “We wanted to see how much physical presence in the same room mattered.” “It was important for us to compare virtual delivery to in-person delivery, and not to baseline,” Batastini says. Likewise, assessments produced similar opinions across modalities, she says. Overall, they found that in-person and virtual interventions produced similar outcomes. It appears that it can, according to Ashley Batastini, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Research at the University of Memphis.īatastini and her colleagues recently published a large meta-analytic study that compared clinical interventions and assessments delivered via videoconferencing with those delivered in-person. For instance, how might technology impact the therapeutic alliance? And mental health care, by definition, has a strong emotional dimension. The COVID-19 pandemic has basically forced most health care providers to see patients remotely, but psychologists have unique concerns and questions about the virtual delivery of their services.
“Now, it’s taken off-and there will be no going back.” Assessing outcomes “Last year, within weeks, the system had to absorb all the challenges of wide-scale adoption,” says Turner. While the technology and infrastructure for telehealth has been available since the mid-1990s, Turner says the health care industry never would have embraced telehealth fully without a status quo–ending event like a pandemic. And research from Jeanine Turner, PhD, a professor of communication, culture, and technology at Georgetown University who has followed telehealth’s growth over the past two decades, has shown that both patients and providers who use telehealth generally view it favorably. Several studies have already proven telepsychology’s effectiveness. Resolving those concerns will be critical to making sure psychologists can continue offering telehealth as demand for mental health services grows, particularly services offered virtually. With telehealth usage rates skyrocketing, experts say resolving concerns around privacy and security, access to care, and payments for providers will be critical as many psychologists adjust to providing care remotely during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
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