Description:
 

The Center for Rural & Community Behavioral Health’s (CRCBH) Telepsychiatry and Behavioral Health Program is designed to:

 

• Promote behavioral health workforce development opportunities for providers of medical and behavioral health care in rural/frontier New Mexico;
• Provide opportunity for children, adolescents, adults and families in rural/frontier New Mexico access to psychiatric specialists with particular expertise in child/adolescent, substance-use-disordered, neuropsychiatric, and geriatric populations via telehealth technology;
• Foster collaboration between primary care and behavioral health providers in these settings;
• Be both flexible enough to adequately respond to the special contexts in which providers care for New Mexicans in rural/frontier areas and structured enough to be functional and implemented.

 

This approach provides various options for distance education (from didactic instruction to case consultation to collaborative assessment and/or treatment) for providers of medical and behavioral health care in rural/frontier areas while also directly improving access to psychiatric services.  The approach includes the provision of educational credits for participating providers, and ensures that community providers will be able to bill for time spent co-treating clients through telehealth when appropriate. Emphasis is placed on the dissemination, modeling and use of evidence-based practice through training, consultation and a model of patient-and-family-centered interdisciplinary collaborative care.

 

 

 

Goals:

• Increased access to specialty psychiatric services throughout New Mexico via telehealth
• Increased clinician skill and satisfaction with skills specific to people with behavioral health problems
• Establish/ reinforce (communication, collaboration) between clinicians in School-Based Health Centers & local Primary Care Providers

 

Activities:

Currently, CRCBH provides the following types of consultative services using telehealth:

• Telehealth psychiatrist as agency direct service provider;
• Telehealth psychiatrist as agency consultant utilizing direct service to train and model modalities of assessment and care;
• Telehealth psychiatrist as agency consultant utilizing case consultation; and
• Telehealth psychiatrist as agency educational consultant and trainer.

 

Partnerships: