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| Patient Treatment Overview - Mental Health Patients |
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Table Of Contents
Advantages of Treatment via the Internet Brief Overview of Treatment Steps Types of Patients Treated Types of Physicians Providing Treatment Maintaining Secure Communications Agreeing to Site Terms Choosing a Doctor Entering New Patient Information Entering Starting Medical History Entering First Online Visit Notifying Doctor the Online Visit Questionnaire Is Ready for Evaluation Reading Notifications from Doctor Reviewing Doctor's Evaluation of Online Visit Questionnaire Entering Follow-Up Online Visit Questionnaire Reviewing Follow-Up Evaluations Changing Patient Information The Strength of Mind® website meets the needs of its clients by providing rapid response for psychiatric care. Utilizing web-based technology, a better use of patient time and physician resources helps ensure ready access to specialized care for those in need. Online visits offer tremendous convenience for both patient and physician. The patient can answer questions about symptoms and describe them in detail at the time they are being felt, rather than weeks later. Using an Internet-capable PC, the patient can conduct the online visit from the convenience of his or her home, at a time of the patient's choosing, say, after the kids have been put to bed. The patient need not even be at home. The online visit can occur at work or on a trip. The requirement is simply getting access to the Internet. Convenience and efficiency are just some of the benefits achieved by the physician. The physician is not restricted to a set schedule and can conduct his or her part of the online visit anytime he or she can work it in. The physician can quickly review the patient's condition, as provided in answers to the appropriate computer-based questionnaire, and quickly arrive at a diagnosis and recommended treatment for the present condition. Like the patient, the physician can perform his or her part of the online visit anywhere an Internet-capable PC is available. In short, everyone benefits in those situations where an online visit is a suitable medium. Convenience, efficiency, and timeliness are the results for all parties. Patients starting treatment with a psychiatrist provide detailed information concerning medical history, family history, and current symptoms by answering questions from the Strength of Mind® website. Individuals are given the opportunity to complete initial visit preparations via any Internet-capable computer. This advance work ensures a more treatment focused face-to-face visit with the psychiatrist. Having completed an initial visit with their psychiatrist, patients may then perform routine follow-up visits by answering a question-set from the website. These follow-up visits might simply be to handle medication management or some mental health problem that crops up between scheduled office visits. Internet facilitated care offers many benefits. Note that visits conducted solely online are reserved for routine follow-up care, not for complicated or unstable conditions. The patient is assumed to have had at least one face-to-face visit with the physician. The targeted patient is someone with a relatively simple mental health condition, one of low risk. Typically, the more simple or stable the case, the more appropriate it is to be handled by a physician via the Web. Complicated and dangerous cases should not be handled in this manner. Therefore, new patients should have a relatively mild to moderate level of acuteness. Established patients with more complicated conditions, but who are mostly stabilized in their course of treatment and medication, are also appropriate recipients of online treatment. Patients can be men or women, but should be 18 years or older. Physicians utilizing the Strength of Mind® website to treat their patients are licensed psychiatrists. The psychiatrists are credentialed physicians specializing in mental health treatment. Strength of MindSM utilizes the most modern security measures to maximize privacy and confidentiality. A secure login, secure communications, and a secure database all work together to ensure patient information is kept confidential and secure. Strength of MindSM utilizes VeriSign's Site Trust Services, giving you the most trustworthy Web experience possible. Our site provides authentication and encryption power using a 40-bit SSL (Secure Server) ID. SSL Certificates are the standard Internet trust credential for authenticating a Web site and encrypting the information users exchange online. A patient must agree to specified terms for utilizing the Strength of Mind® website to conduct online visits. The terms spell out the obligations of the patient and how patient chart information is used by the patient's physician to effectively carry out treatment. Not only the patient, but all users of the website must agree to website utilization terms tailored to the type of user, physician or patient, for example. How a patient chooses a physician depends upon the situation. The simple case is where the patient goes to a physician for treatment and the physician determines the Strength of Mind® website and online visits are appropriate for the patient's needs. In other situations, a group to which the patient belongs, an employer-based group, for example, could offer mental health treatment from a physician who utilizes the Strength of Mind® website for appropriate cases. Remember that online visits are just another tool given physicians to carry out mental health treatment. When a patient starts with the Strength of Mind® website, he or she must first be identified to the website by a physician or one of the members of the physician's staff. In the process, the patient must establish a login ID and password to ensure secure access to online treatment. Other pieces of information are captured to get a clear picture of who the patient is, such as: name, address, age, gender, marital status, student info, employment info, phone numbers, email address, emergency contact, alternative emergency contact, etc. A patient new to the Strength of Mind® website must enter his or her medical history. This gives the physician background information about the patient and keeps that information online for ready reference throughout subsequent treatment. Medical history would include a summary of medical treatments in the past, medications currently in use, and ongoing medical conditions. The medical history is a starting point for the physician's understanding of the patient's condition. There are two typical situations for receiving online treatment via the Strength of Mind® website. First, the patient may be new to the physician and the physician has determined the Strength of Mind® website can facilitate treatment. Second, the patient may already be receiving treatment from the physician, i.e., the patient is an established patient. In this case, the physician has decided the patient's treatment can be effectively conducted via the Strength of Mind® website. Regardless of which situation applies, the physician will have designated an appropriate questionnaire for the patient to use in describing the condition that has led to this first online visit. The online visit questionnaire used is designed to capture the patient's understanding of the mental health condition leading up to this first Strength of Mind® website session. When a patient completes the initial medical event questionnaire, his or her physician will be notified automatically via email that the information entered in the initial online visit is ready to be evaluated. In other words, it is time for the physician to conduct his or her part of the online visit. When the physician has completed and released his or her evaluation of the patient's initial online visit, an email notification is sent automatically to the patient that the response and the results of the physician's evaluation are ready to be reviewed by the patient. Once the patient has received email notification that the initial online visit questionnaire has been evaluated by the physician and is ready for patient review, the patient will log into the Strength of Mind® website. Then the patient will call up the online visit questionnaire and review what the physician has to say about this initial online visit. The physician will provide an analysis of the patient's condition and the recommended treatment. When the patient calls up the online visit questionnaire, he or she will be presented with the original questions, the patient's answers to the questions, and the physician's evaluation. The patient can even call up the medical history and the physician's evaluation of the medical history, if provided. In any event, the system records the fact that the patient has reviewed the physician's evaluation and automatically notifies the physician of such by email. After the initial online visit has been conducted, the patient will start a follow-up online visit in accordance with physician instructions. The Strength of Mind® website requires the physician to authorize any follow-up online session before it can occur. Authorization includes the physician specifying which type of questionnaire is suitable for the next online visit. Assuming the next online visit has been authorized by the physician, the patient will enter his or her responses to questions found in the follow-up questionnaire. The system will automatically notify the physician via email when the follow-up questionnaire is released by the patient to the physician. When the patient has been notified by email that the follow-up evaluation has been completed by the physician, the patient will log into the Strength of Mind® website and review the physician's response. As with an initial online visit, the system records the fact the patient has read the evaluation and automatically sends the physician an email notice telling him or her the patient has read the evaluation. The master information recorded in the Strength of Mind® website about a patient--name, address, phone numbers, emergency contact, etc.--needs to be kept up to date by the patient. Anytime any of this information changes, the patient should update the information kept online. It is essential that the system, hence the physician, has the most up-to-date information about the patient.
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