Telepsychiatry platform for remote patient assessment

Our customer needed a telehealth platform to target the needs of hospitals that lack on-site mental health professionals. We developed a HIPAA-compliant web application that enables efficient telehealth-based patient assessment, medical case processing, and coordination of patient placement in suitable healthcare facilities.

12 months

to fully operational, secure telehealth system

25 IT experts

with healthcare domain expertise involved in the project

Consistent delivery

despite changing requirements and expanding project scope

Telepsychiatry platform for remote patient assessment

All technologies used

.NET

ASP.NET Core

TypeScript

React

Microsoft Azure

Zoom

Twilio

Microsoft SQL

Entity Framework Core

Identity Server

Swagger

SendGrid

Fluent Validator

SAML

SkiaSharp

MSSQL

OpenRouteService

QuestPDF

Skia

Engagement model

About the customer

The customer is a provider of telepsychiatry services, including psychiatric evaluation, treatment plan creation, and therapy sessions. With a large pool of experienced mental health professionals on board, the organization caters to the facilities and institutions requiring psychiatric services.

Industry

Healthcare & Pharma

Location

USA

Services

Telepsychiatric evaluation & treatment

Client base

400+ facilities across 35+ states

The challenge

To address the existing shortage of available psychiatric care, our customer wanted to build a telehealth solution to provide their services for hospitals. They needed a development team with experience in the healthcare industry that could quickly start the project and deliver a platform that:

  • Connects the healthcare facility to an appropriate psychiatrist
    who’ll perform patient assessment and provide recommendations for further treatment and patient placement
  • Efficiently processes medical data
    to help medical specialists quickly understand the patient's condition
  • Enables efficient and centralized management of patient documentation
    by facilities, medical coordinators, and psychiatrists
  • Facilitates placement of patients to the most appropriate hospital
    for inpatient care
  • Provides extensive configuration options,
    like customizable evaluation forms and patient admission criteria, to adapt to the needs of end-user facilities
  • Aligns with standards and guidelines
    for international and domestic healthcare data security
  • Is hosted on a cloud-centric infrastructure
    to ensure easy scaling and maintenance

The solution

At a glance

We developed a HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform with case management, teleconsultations, facility placement, and secure data handling features and implemented it to a scalable Azure infrastructure, while making sure to meet tight deadlines and cater to evolving project requirements.

By combining deep healthcare expertise with agile delivery practices, we created a solution that addressed hospitals’ critical gaps in psychiatric care delivery.

Patient case creation

The system allows medical staff to register a case for hospital admission and fill in primary patient data, add and verify insurance information, and specify the required telepsychiatry consultation type (phone or video). Medical coordinators can also include patient vitals and initial physical examination data, case notes, and medical files to help a psychotherapist form a thorough understanding of the patient’s psychological state.

Patient case processing

To ensure patient case visibility, the platform provides a system of case statuses from creation to completion, a centralized case list for a 360-degree view of all active cases, and a detailed case dashboard that displays the duration of a selected case’s processing phase. These tools also help coordinators identify bottlenecks in individual cases and the overall pipeline, ensuring more efficient case management.

Patient history panel

The patient history dashboard provides a consolidated view into a patient’s past admissions, legal statuses, criminal charges, affinity to violent behavior, and more, helping coordinators select the best suitable psychiatrist and potential inpatient facility. With a custom-developed system of tags, coordinators can highlight the most acute conditions and major assessment-affecting factors, enabling other users to access the most important data at a glance.

Teleconsultations

Once a psychiatrist is ready to perform a consultation, the system alerts the source facility of the need to prepare the patient for the upcoming examination and generates a meeting room in Zoom accessible through the case panel.

Psychiatric assessment

The platform offers standardized psychiatric evaluation forms, with available diagnoses aligned with the latest editions of health issues classifications DSM and ICD, to summarize teleconsultations and provide treatment recommendations. Facilities can also design custom evaluation forms, add custom patient questions, and set conditional flows that display or skip follow-up questions based on patient responses.

Patient placement

The patient placement dashboard provides a list of potential facilities based on parameters like recommended treatment, the categories of patients that facilities can treat, voluntary/involuntary patient placement, available beds, and more.

Expected travel time calculation

The platform estimates travel time to mental health facilities to offer the most geographically convenient ones first, easing the travel burden on patients.

Call history & mass change

The call history feature enables medical staff to log, track, and update the details of communications with facilities regarding patient admission, while the mass change feature allows for simultaneous updates of statuses and details across multiple patient cases when medical staff receives information affecting the processing of several patient cases.

Notification system

The platform enables automated notifications for patient case updates to streamline collaboration on cases across geographically dispersed facilities and psychiatrists without overwhelming the staff with irrelevant messages.

HIPAA compliance

The platform ensures HIPAA-compliant medical data security and management through measures such as data encryption at rest and in transfer, database backups, user activity logging, PHI data access tracking, and single sign-on for secure user authentication.

Multiple user roles

The platform supports user roles for medical staff, coordinators, and admins from both the customer’s team and their clients, each with distinct permission sets.

Activity audit & reporting

The platform logs user actions for visibility into past activity, processed cases, previous psychiatric evaluations, etc., and generates activity reports that help facilities assess the quality and speed of provided telepsychiatry services.

Administrative features

The platform provides the customer’s admins with features like adding new users, merging duplicate patient records, and managing facilities to easily edit all the necessary information.

Our team worked in two-week sprints and held demos after each to ensure alignment with the client’s shifting priorities.

Throughout the platform’s development, we conducted end-to-end testing, validating the solution’s functionality, usability, security, and compatibility with different browsers.

To deploy the telehealth platform, we set up a scalable and secure Microsoft Azure-based cloud infrastructure and implemented a CI/CD pipeline using Azure DevOps tools to ensure fast and easy code integration and deployment.

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The outcome

Our team delivered a HIPAA-compliant telepsychiatry solution for remote patient assessment and placement in suitable healthcare facilities that helps:

01

Ensure 24/7 availability of telehealth services

02

Streamline the processing of mental health patients in hospitals

03

Improve the availability of psychiatric care in geographically dispersed healthcare facilities

04

Reduce patient travel distance by 40%

05

Decrease patient waiting time by 25%

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