Psychiatric assessment of a nursing home population using audiovisual telecommunication.
The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that psychiatric assessment of nursing home residents could be reliably carried out remotely via telecommunications. Twenty-seven nursing home residents each had two interviews consisting of the following three rating scales: the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), and the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). The interviews were conducted by three trained psychiatrists, each of whom interviewed two-thirds of the subjects. Subjects were sequentially assigned to have either two in-person interviews (in-person group) or one in-person and one remote interview via telecommunication (remote group). Inter-rater reliability was calculated separately for each condition (in-person vs remote group) for each of the three rating scales. Intraclass correlations on the MMSE were .95 for the remote group and .83 for the in-person group. On the GDS, they were .82 for the remote group and .86 for the in-person group. Finally, on the BPRS, they were .81 for the remote group and .49 for the in-person group. There were no statistically significant differences in intraclass correlation on any of the three scales for the remote group compared with the in-person group, indicating that nursing home residents can be reliably assessed remotely via telecommunication.
Grob
P
P
Department of Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA.
Weintraub
D
D
Sayles
D
D
Raskin
A
A
Ruskin
P
P
D000368:Aged; D015577:Geriatric Assessment; D006707:Homes for the Aged; D006801:Humans; D007297:Inpatients / Q000523:psychology; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D009735:Nursing Homes; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D013685:Telecommunications