Spartanburg Medical Center is a We have an emergency room That sees 95,000 emergency We're a level one trauma center, stroke center, and we have a large behavioral health area both for adults and for pediatrics.

a significant percentage of what we see are behavioral health emergencies.

We do have psychiatrists that work in the facility, and they are really helpful, during typical business hours dealing with adult patients.

But the telehealth program in South Carolina has the ability to pr adolescent and pediatric psychiatry, which is something that a lot of facilities across South Carolina don't have on site in real time.

This program supports the emergency rooms around the state so that when a mentally ill patient comes in, they have someone to consult about what the problem might be and get some recommendations, When we see a patient in the emergency room, we're able to see the patient very clearly on a screen.

We have control of the cameras so we can zoom in close to see if there's any abnormal movement in their hands or their face that might signify something else going on Sometimes there's 1 to 4 providers with tele-psychiatry in DMH and they kind of fill in those gaps of we have patients who need to be seen.

Tele-psychiatry as far as providers is extremely important because we have a lack, so we definitely need providers for mental It 's important to seek treatment and to find a prov There's always been an associated stigma.

I can't go receive the hel Nobody wants to talk about mental health.

I think that there are that were trying to remove the stigma as far as the nation And you can't be your whole self if you can't be 100% complete.

A lot of so having a psychiatrist involved early on, before psychotropic medication have started gives us a chance to sort of get some information about what the most appropriate treatment plan would be.

There is a shortage of providers of mental health services, including psychiatrist and counselors The rural community sometimes doesn't have a psychiatrist at all, not in private practice, no one to come to the emergency room the cities they have psychiatrists.

But with the shortage, they're all really busy and they don't want to stop intermittently and take off for the emergency room to see to crisis.

So it's much easier since that's all we do, is to have a psychiatrist available for the whole time.

room or an emergency room where before we had this program, psychiatric patients were coming in to the emergency room and they were backing up because the ED doctors didn't have the time to do the kind of evaluation that might be needed to let them leave.

And so they were being held to be admitted, but then they were backing up and using lots of emergency room And in the emergency rooms.

Were asking for help from the Departmen we started this program so that we could see the patients We could get more patients discharged and start medicine, some of them leaving earlier than getting a bed.

And those have got a bed having a shorter length of stay.

and hopefully we'll be able to grow the program to any hospital that doesn't have a psychiatrist to help them.

Emergency room physicians get better services to our patients, as well as have the emergency ro m physicians feel more comfortable with what they're doing.

Telehealth is definitely the future.

I think that it's the conf as a convenient piece for the patient, that it's going to happen relatively quickly and knowing that we can work together to make a So I definitely think that telehealth is the future.