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.