Psychiatric assessment of a nursing home population using audiovisual telecommunication

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that psychiatric assessment of nursing home residents could be reliably carried out remotely via telecomm unications. Twenty-seven nursing home residents each had two interviews con sisting of the following three rating scales: the Mini-Mental State Examina tion (MMSE), the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), and the Brief Psychiatri c Rating Scale (BPRS). The interviews were conducted by three trained psych iatrists, each of whom interviewed two-thirds of the subjects. Subjects wer e sequentially assigned to have either two in-person interviews tin-person group) or one in-person and one remote interview via telecommunication (rem ote group). Inter-rater reliability was calculated separately for each cond ition tin-person vs remote group) for each of the three rating scales. Intr aclass correlations on the MMSE were .95 for the remote group and .83 for t he in-person group. On the GDS, they were .82 for the remote group and .86 for the in-person group. Finally, on the BPRS, they were .81 for the remote group and .49 for the in-person group. There were no statistically signifi cant differences in intraclass correlation on any of the three scales for t he remote group compared with the in-person group, indicating that nursing home residents can be reliably assessed remotely via telecommunication.