Technology is rapidly becoming a key player in care delivery, lifelong learning, and education/training. The American Psychiatric Association Practice-Based Learning and Improvement Core Competencies include the use information technology and lifelong learning [1]. Current competency-based education (CBE) focuses on skills rather than on what is taught [2, 3]. Competency may be defined as a measurable human capability required for effective performance [4]. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) [5] suggested three key elements for patient-centered care: skills-focused education, interdisciplinary team-based care, and a technology/informatics-oriented administrative approach.
A key premise of telepsychiatric competencies published in 2015 [6] is that faculty clinicians and educators have to first improve their care via clinical and technological competence, in order to then oversee trainees’ use of technologies in clinical care. Fundamental steps to this work are the alignment of clinical outcomes with teaching/supervisory methods, evaluation, and feedback [6, 7]. Professional association standards and guidelines typically do not focus on competencies, are complex, and are frequently incomplete (e.g., diverse populations and settings) [6, 7, 8], and comparisons across professions are rare [7].
Telebehavioral health (TBH) is a broad term inclusive across behavioral health professions and technically includes both mental health and substance use care; in this paper, it will also include TP. Each BH discipline and field has its own nomenclature for telehealth (e.g., telepsychiatry, telepsychology, distance counseling) [9], though competencies related to technological standards were suggested years ago [10, 11]. A TBH competency set arrived in [12] and a specific one for use of social media arrived in 2018 [13]. Care delivered by TBH may require additional skills—or adjusted behaviors—compared to in-person care [6, 7, 11, 12, 13].
Maheu, M., Drude, K., Hertlein, K., Hilty, D. (2018). A Framework of Interprofessional Telebehavioral Health Competencies: Implementation and Challenges Moving Forward. Academic Psychiatry, 42(6), 824-833. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-018-0988-1