Walk-in telemental health clinics improve access and efficiency: a 2-year follow-up analysis

Telemedicine has demonstrated potential to improve access and quality of mental health services in underserved areas. Use of telemedicine to deliver health services may enable a range of synergistic innovations in care practices, but such innovations will require rigorous evaluation.

We evaluated a telemental health program designed to increase access by eliminating clinician travel time in a multisite rural community mental health center. The program included both traditionally scheduled and "open scheduled" clinics provided via telemedicine. An initial 13-month evaluation showed better access, quality, and sustainability compared with similar services delivered using traditional methods available elsewhere within the organization. A 24-month follow-up analysis was undertaken to determine if initial findings remained consistent.

Telemedicine clinics continued to show remarkably consistent advantages in both access and quality compared with traditional services. Cost-efficiency gains were also robust, maintaining a 20-percentage-point advantage in conversion of scheduled time to billable time over traditional clinics. Much of this advantage was attributable to the 20% of clinic volume that was open-scheduled or "walk-in" in nature.

This study confirms earlier findings that telemedicine technology can support synergistic innovations in service format (such as "open scheduling") and maintain measurable advantages in access and quality along with cost-efficiencies past the initial implementation period.