Financial Advantages of Telepsychiatry

Financial Advantages of TelepsychiatryAt a typical County Mental Health Center in California

American Telepsychiatrists ™

Transforming Psychiatric Healthcare Access

We are often asked…

“Why would we want to pay you a couple of hundred dollars an hour when an in-house doctor only costs us $107/hour?”



In this presentation, we provide actual numbers from 2011 services we provided to a typical California county.



First rule?Comparing us by an hourly rate

doesn’t work because we only get paid if a patient is seen.



How to really compare?The only way to compare us with

in-house doctors would be to compare cost per patient encounter rather than cost per hourly rate.



Salaried Doctors:A full-time adult psychiatrist costs

the county approximately $196,426/yr plus benefits. If you add in a conservative 20 percent for payroll taxes, insurance, and retirement benefits, that comes to approximately $235,711/yr.



Salaried Doctors Working Days:With paid holidays, vacation, and

sick leave, remove approximately 30 business days of seeing patients per year for an employed doctor.

On average, there are 260 business days per year. Subtract the 30 benefit days, and that leaves 230 business days/yr.



Patient No-Shows:The average no-show rate at this

county mental health clinic was 36 percent per day over the course of 2011. Add in late-cancellations, and that rate goes up to 41 percent.



If the maximum number of patients seen per day is 16, and you subtract the 41 percent no-show/late-cancellation rate, that leaves an average of 10* patients per day seen by the average in-house doctor.

(*actual numbers were in the range of five to seven patients per day seen by an employed psychiatrist)



Number of Patients seen and cost per Patient:Using the high end, or 10 patients

seen per day, that comes to 2300 patient encounters per year for a 40 hour-per-week, in-house, employed adult psychiatrist.

$235,711 divided by 2300 comes to $102.48 per patient encounter.



Telemedicine Doctors: If you consider that on average we see

a patient every 30 minutes, then working 4286.8 hours in 2011 came out to 8774 patient encounters for a total of $810,206.30.

The resulting cost per patient encounter was approximately $92.00 for a patient seen by one of our telemedicine doctors.



Analysis Results:A Telemedicine doctor costs

you $92.00 per patient encounter compared with $102.48 per patient encounter for an employed adult psychiatrist.



Cost containment:Ten dollars savings per

encounter adds up very quickly when you consider the total number of patient encounters per year.

But the savings don’t stop there…



Reduced risk of Liability and associated costs:

Compare the risks and liability of an in-house doctor to a telemedicine doctor contracted through American Telepsychiatrists.*

*Remember, not all telepsychiatry companies are

created equal.



We cannot be hurt in your facility.

We cannot file worker’s comp claims.

We cannot physically touch a patient, and therefore we cannot have patient complaints regarding physical misconduct.



We cannot be physically attacked by patients.

We do not get paid for maternity/paternity leave.

We are not restricted from working based on bad weather or traffic conditions.



We do not get involved in in-house personality conflicts with other staff members.

We do not turn away walk-in, stand-by, or late-arriving patients.

We strive to spend quality time with each patient rather than rushing them out the door.



We can usually replace an ill doctor within minutes, and therefore we do not require patient cancellations due to physician illness.

We cover our own doctors with regards to vacations and sick leave, and therefore we do not require in-house doctors to pick up the slack or the county to hire expensive locum tenens doctors.



We do not cost the system years of retirement benefits long after we stop seeing patients.

We do not cost anything for healthcare.

You do not have to spend money recruiting us or moving us physically to your county.

Once we know your system, we train any replacement Telepsychiatrists. You need only train a doctor once. We do the rest.



Simple Motivational Psychology Doctors on salary get paid the same no

matter how many patients they see. There is no incentive to see more patients on any given day. A no-show is a gift of free time to the doctor.

Our telemedicine doctors only get paid if a patient is seen. Telemedicine doctors are motivated to see walk-in, stand-by, and late arriving patients. They do not need to be rescheduled.



Logical Conclusion?When you look at the big picture, there are exceptional advantages to using our fee-for-service telemedicine services when compared to using employed physicians.



How does American Telepsychiatrists differ from other telepsychiatry companies?



We use Board Certified Psychiatrists (most companies do not do this as a policy).

We supply 24/7 IT support to our doctors.

If one doctor’s system goes down, we can usually have another doctor in the chair within 30 minutes.

We have Psych Certified RNs supporting our psychiatrists and available as liaison between your patients and our doctors.

We have staff available to call patients to remind them of their appointments.



American Telepsychiatrists is owned by a Board Certified Child/Adolescent & Adult Psychiatrist who understands the medical ins and outs of public and private psychiatric care facilities and who actively works in these facilities as a telepsychiatrist (most other companies are owned by former therapists, psychologists, or by business people who have no medical knowledge what-so-ever).



We call patients back between scheduled visits (most companies put you off until the next time the doctor is in the chair).

Our prices include reasonable telephone and email interaction throughout the week to address medication questions, refills, lab results, etc. (most other companies don’t even order labs in the first place).

We are committed to continuity of care (most other companies change doctors frequently).



Our mission is to provide services to the underserved. We intentionally seek out and hire doctors with an attitude toward public service (most other companies find doctors who are in it for the money and who want to rush 5 or 6 patients through in an hour in order to bill out that many 90862 billing codes). We take 60 minutes to do an initial eval and 30 minutes for a follow-up.

Chose American Telepsychiatrists for all of your telepsychiatry needs.Click to Contact

http://www.caltelepsych.com/contact-us

Health & Medicine

Financial Advantages of Telepsychiatry