Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Nov 16, 2020
Date Accepted: Jul 19, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Primary care psychiatry eConsults: Descriptive Analysis of an electronic consultation program in a rural, academic medical center
ABSTRACT
Background:
While primary care providers serve a crucial role in addressing the mental health needs of patients, referrals to specialists may be necessary in the treatment of complex psychiatric conditions. Psychiatry electronic consultations (eConsults) can serve as a valuable tool in providing specialist advice for primary care physicians when specialty care is not readily available.
Objective:
The goal of this study was to evaluate the content and implementation rate of eConsults by primary care providers in a rural, academic medical center.
Methods:
This is retrospective review of 343 electronic consults placed between May 2016 and February 2019 by primary care providers at a single academic medical center. Response time and eConsult content, including patient demographics, distance of patient and PCP from consulting provider, consult question type, patient diagnosis, recommendations, and implementation of recommendation, were analyzed.
Results:
The most common diagnoses associated with our eConsults were depression (40.2%) and anxiety (32.3%). The most commonly asked consult question was regarding medication management, including medication choice, dosage, and side effects (83.5%). A majority of recommendations by the consulting psychiatrist were implemented by the PCP (94%). The average time to respond to an eConsult was 26 hours.
Conclusions:
This study demonstrates that psychiatry eConsults can be conducted in a timely manner and that PCPs implement the recommendations at a high rate.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.