Telepsychiatry Services for Korean Immigrants

Abstract

Asian Americans often face cultural and language barriers when obtaining mental health treatment. With the small number of Asian mental health providers, it is difficult to ensure the linguistic and ethnic matching of providers and patients. Telepsychiatry holds great promise to address the unique needs of Asian Americans. We developed a project to establish telepsychiatry services that connect Korean mental health patients in Georgia with a linguistically and culturally competent psychiatrist in California and assessed the level of acceptability of psychiatric treatment via real-time teleconferencing among these patients. Upon the completion of the program, 16 patients (5 men, 11 women) completed a questionnaire that measured their acceptability of the telepsychiatry service. The findings indicate a high level of acceptance of the program among Korean patients. The quantitative and qualitative data show that they especially appreciated the cultural sensitivity of the consultation and the comfortable interaction with the provider. However, challenges such as technical issues of teleconferencing may negatively affect the quality of the clinical interaction. Our study expands the knowledge base regarding the acceptability of such services to a population that experiences disparities in mental health care. Future research should extend telepsychiatry services to other Asian population groups that experience lower access to mental health services.

The Effectiveness of Telemental Health: A 2013 Review

“…A recent study of nearly 40 rural health clinics compared impressions of 25 primary care providers (PCPs) and 32 staff impressions of factors important to care: using providers who value differences (5.4 and 7.0, respectively), quality of the provider's care (4.9 and 7.0, respectively), access to care in general (4.5 and 7.0, respectively), and availability of trained interpreters for use with patients (4.4 and 7.0, respectively). 38 Others are studying the specific needs of Hispanics/Latinos, 37,39,40 Asians, 41 Native Americans, 35,43,44 Eastern Europeans, 44 and those using sign language 45 -all using telepsychiatry for service provision. With patients of different cultural backgrounds, using the patients' primary language allows for a more comfortable atmosphere where they may express their genuine feelings and emotions.…”

Review of key telepsychiatry outcomes

“…Telepsychiatry review consist of similar items rated on a Likert-scale. Of the 31 studies reviewed, 23 concluded that patients rated their experience with telepsychiatry services as "good" to "excellent" , while the remaining 7 studies reported mixed reactions among participants [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] . For example, Hilty et al [33] reported generally high satisfaction among outpatients seeking specialty mental health care but satisfaction scores were statistically higher for rural patients compared to suburban patients.…”

Korean migrants' experiences and attitudes towards mental illness and mental health services in New Zealand

“…Hilty et al (2013) found in their 2013 review of telemental health that such services were effective in providing both linguistically and culturally sensitive services to ethnic minorities. Ye et al (2012) saw the effectiveness of telepsychiatry services for Korean migrants living in a more remote area of the USA who received mental health care via computer-based videoconferencing technology from Korean mental health professionals working in a more urban area of the USA.…”