Telepsychiatry for Police and Law Enforcement

While the benefits of telepsychiatry for inmates within a jail or prison may be obvious, telepsychiatry also offers some unique benefits to local police departments as they are forced to manage the behavioral health issues of arrested individuals prior to their admission into the jail as an inmate.  Further, these local police forces are often involved within the community during incidents of psychiatric crisis where the safety of those involved may be in question. 

It is not uncommon for local police to be responsible for transporting an individual to a hospital emergency room or psychiatric crisis center for an onsite psychiatric evaluation before transporting that individual to the county jail or psychiatric hospital.  As everyone knows, these emergency rooms and psychiatric crisis centers are often overcrowded, understaffed, and working with limited resources.  The result is that local police can face significant wait times for the required psychiatric and medical clearance at the hospital.  These waits take two officers off the streets and often result in overtime expenses.  Depending on the structure of that police force and its capacity, these incidents where psychiatric clearance is required can have a significantly negative impact on that force both financially and operationally.

InSight has worked cooperatively with local police forces to provide an alternative mechanism for obtaining psychiatric clearances by implementing telepsychiatry programs at key access points outside of hospitals where local police can use real-time video conferencing to have the individual within their custody psychiatrically evaluated by one of InSight’s remote telepsychiatrists.  The remote clinician can make a quick determination if the individual poses a credible suicide threat and can make recommendations for the officer to either transport the individual to a hospital or alternatively admit the individual into the jail. 

These programs greatly reduce the potential for an arrested individual to hoax an illness in order to delay admittance to jail and alleviates the burden of transportation as well as long waits within an emergency room.

Further, these programs offer police forces, governments, and ultimately the tax payer remarkable savings by eliminating unnecessary waits with overtime and freeing up valuable law enforcement personnel to return to policing the streets.