MeHealth (Me Te)

The Corona crisis abruptly accelerated telemedicine and digitization processes in healthcare. Psychiatric and psychotherapeutic care experienced a clearly measurable cut, especially in the first Lockdown 2020 (cf. Zartler 2020). Psychiatric and psychotherapeutic care services at a distance and remote digital applications are proving challenging, but increasingly essential: data protection, integrative therapy planning that operates across organizations and institutions (intramural, extramural, outpatient, office-based) and is able to provide patients with crisis-proof care on the one hand and at a distance on the other, should find the solutions in technically and legally secure eHealth applications. In this context, the great skepticism and the findings about the above-average situational opt-out in ELGA of psychiatric patients must be countered with interdisciplinary resilience-promoting strategies (cf. Steinmaurer 2019). The consortium aims to develop resilience-promoting ICT tools in line with the actual needs of psychiatric patients, but without creating a parallel structure to the ELGA system.

The goal is to enable patient-centered continuity of care through exploratory R&D methods. The exploratory project will examine the development and provision of care processes and ICT tools: In “Integrated Healthcare Management for psychiatric patients” (IHM), the patient is supported in their own recovery and confidence-generating process: on the one hand, via the treatment/treatment providers, and on the other hand, through digital means such as telepsychiatric applications and self-managed documentation. By means of IHM tools (IHMT), findings and documentation are digitally handed over to the patient in a data-protection compliant and trustworthy manner and can be managed by patients themselves for the first time, whereby they will receive sufficient support and training from clinical and nursing staff. With findings and documentation as well as a (digitized) therapy program, the patient can hand over their own treatment path more efficiently and comprehensively, and continue to shape it with the aftercare healthcare provider as part of discharge management. The IHM is developed as a medical guideline in close coordination with professional societies and subsequently disseminated as best practice. Furthermore, as part of R&D, it is recommended that sustainable integrative systems are developed for telemedicine in the psychiatric field, i.e. “telepsychiatry”, with a supplementary focus on the application field “teleconsultation psychiatry”. Here, it is important to develop safe and ethically tested digital instruments that enable, for example, psychiatric consultation services for highly infectious patients in the event of a crisis (distancing).

In the context of the future aim of ensuring the availability and security of psychiatric services in the event of acute crises and pandemics (resilience & distancing), both the development of the application field of IHM and telepsychiatry (teleconsultation psychiatry) are underpinned by scientific and sociocultural findings, in particular from the Covid19 crisis.