One year ago, only 26 video visits with University of Michigan mental health providers had happened in nearly six months, compared with more than 30,000 in-person visits.

But Jennifer Severe, one of the three psychiatrists who helped launch a test of telehealth initiatives in the outpatient psychiatry clinic, wasn’t about to give up.

She prepared to give a talk at the beginning of April of 2020, hoping to convince more of her colleagues to give telepsychiatry a try, now that a major insurance company was paying for it. She even had examples of how clinic staff had “rescued” the care of patients who had called at the last minute to cancel an appointment for their depression or bipolar disorder but agreed to a video therapy session instead.

Severe never got to give that talk.

Instead, on March 23, all non-urgent health care across the state shut down to prevent the spread of COVID-19. And video chats and phone calls became the only way for most patients to connect with their psychiatrists and psychologists from Michigan Medicine, the university’s academic medical center.

For nearly all of those patients, it has stayed that way for the past nine months.

According to the new findings published in JMIR Formative Research, the convenience of seeing a provider without leaving home, and avoiding potential exposure to the coronavirus—especially for those with other underlying health concerns—factor heavily into this preference. So does a patient’s initial experience with seeing a provider virtually.

Read the full article about virtual mental health care by Kara Gavin at Futurity.