The advent of technology in healthcare provided medical workers with numerous benefits that quickly reshaped the process of care provision while bringing several disadvantages to the care environment as well. As one of the elements of telehealth, telepsychiatry represents a complex set of services that are provided to patients with no direct face-to-face contact. It may be suggested that the ability to evade any frontal interactions provides patients with more care options and facilitates medication management and patient education (Shore et al., 2020; Spivak et al., 2020). The purpose of the current project is to validate the benefits of telepsychiatry and pave the way for further updates through the interface of Kotter’s change model and quality improvement initiatives supported by Six Sigma methods. The author of the paper expects to establish a positive experience across the local facility and appeal to a larger number of potential patients who could benefit from telepsychiatry from the comfort of their homes.
Background of the Practice Issue
The core local practice concern that has to be addressed is an increasingly high level of reluctance among workers that has to be addressed if the team is looking forward to reaping most of the benefits of telehealth. Accordingly, the problem that the author offers to resolve is a larger-scale implementation of telepsychiatry in an attempt to appeal to both local care providers and patients, especially with the (a) increased costs of healthcare services forced by the pandemic and (b) an exceptionally quick spread of technology across most spheres of human lives. The aim of the project is to implement Kotter’s Change Model and Six Sigma to validate the need for transformation and lay the foundation for further quality improvements. According to Reinhardt et al. (2019) and Freeman et al. (2020), some of the workers and patients could remain reluctant to telepsychiatry, so the idea should be to make the experience much more relaxed and focused on comfort and high-quality services. The increasing popularity of various technologies makes it safe to say that no contemporary initiative can become a reality without a digitalized intervention.
Despite the lack of interpersonal contact, the author considers telepsychiatry a reasonable means of addressing current issues in mental health care because remote psychiatric sessions give a feeling of privacy and safety to every patient.
John Kotter’s Change Model
Table 1. John Kotter’s Change Model in telepsychiatry.
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
Table 2. FMEA for telepsychiatry
Six Sigma and Quality Improvement
Table 3. Six Sigma for telepsychiatry
Budget
Table 4. Budget for the implementation of telepsychiatry.
Donabedian’s Quality Framework
Table 5. Donabedian’s quality framework for telepsychiatry.
Measures of Effectiveness
The most appropriate qualitative measure of effectiveness for the proposed quality improvement initiative will be feedback collection. While gaining insight into team members’ and patients’ concerns, the administration will also have the opportunity to map future activities and evaluate their perceived benefits in association with the key strengths of telepsychiatry. Patient feedback is exceptional because it will broaden the facility’s horizons in terms of how the existing assets could be utilized to appeal to patients and improve the quality of remote care.
As for the quantitative measures, it may be recommended to pay closer attention to the number of patients engaging in telepsychiatry and the amount of time one spends communicating inside a telehealth application. These two numbers would signify the presence of particular tendencies connected to telepsychiatry, as patient engagement does not have to be viewed only through the prism of qualitative information. Based on the number of telepsychiatry patients and the amount of time spent in sessions, the management will be able to predict revenue on investment and conclude whether the telehealth initiative was financially successful or not.
Means of Visual Reporting
The selected practice issue may be best presented with the help of (1) a bar graph for the number of patients engaging in telepsychiatry and (2) a pie chart for the distribution of time spent in session. The first will be required to establish a graphic representation of how the administration was able to appeal to the potential pool of customers while the latter would display the most popular durations of telepsychiatric sessions. Both these measures could also be offered to the audience in the form of a histogram so as to highlight the dynamics of the proposed telepsychiatry solutions.
Conclusion
Within the framework of the current project, the researcher pointed out the main reasons why telepsychiatry has a future and also has to be viewed as an essential addition to the existing field of healthcare. John Kotter’s Change Model, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, and Six Sigma can be successfully implemented to enhance the quality of care and ensure that most of the benefits of telemedicine will be turned into monetary profit and patient satisfaction. It is proposed to quantify the number of patients and the amount of time spent in psychiatric sessions to assess the strength of the proposed program. In terms of qualitative data, the researcher would like to rely on patient, stakeholder, and care providers’ feedback in order to be able to collect the latest insights into potential problems affecting the given healthcare facility.
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