Tips to Treat Geriatric Psych Patients Successfully Via Telehealth

While on-site at the 2025 Psych Congress NP Institute, steering committee member Amber Hoberg, MSN, APRN, PMHNP-BC, shares practical insights on delivering effective psychiatric treatment via telehealth to older adults. Drawing from her experiences in both outpatient and long-term care settings, she highlights the challenges of digital literacy and the importance of caregiver collaboration. A hybrid care approach, Hoberg urges, can help to foster trust and rapport with patients who may be skeptical of virtual encounters.

Learn how periodic in-person visits can enhance telehealth effectiveness and improve outcomes for geriatric psychiatric care.

For more telehealth expert insights, visit the Telehealth Excellence Forum.

Read the transcript:

Amber Hoberg, MSN, APRN, PMHNP-BC: Hi, my name is Amber Hoberg. I'm a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. I practice with Morningstar Family Medicine and Baptist Health System in San Antonio, Texas, as well as Visionary Psychiatry in Hillsborough, Oregon.

Psych Congress Network: Can you speak to the challenges and successes of treating geriatric patients via telehealth?

Hoberg: Using telehealth to assess older population patients can come with quite a bit of challenges. What I find is that this particular generation often does not understand technology. It depends on my setting of care on how successful I am with doing telehealth.

Sometimes I'm not as successful unless they have a really savvy family member, such as a daughter or son, who is there on my outpatient side.

On my inpatient side, it tends to be a little bit easier. When I'm working in long-term care, I'm working in assisted living memory care. Often I have staff there that's capable of helping me. They can come into the room with the patient when I'm asking certain questions

If the patient's not understanding this, they can help reframe the question, or if they're hard of hearing, try to tell the patient in a different way, or maybe use a louder tone than what I can do over the telehealth. A lot of times, that can be very helpful.

What I have found in my particular practice, because I do practice in Oregon, and most of my practice, in Oregon, is long-term care, is that I started off primarily doing it telehealth, and it worked for the most part. But there were times where my patients were like, "well, why can't you just come in and see me?" or "you don't seem like a real person." So, what I always find with these older population patients, trying to do somewhat of a hybrid is always important. This is where maybe you'll go in and see them and be able to provide [in-person] care, then other times seeing them through the telehealth.

For my particular practice, every quarter I go in once to the home so that I can see the patients, they know I'm a real person, I can talk to them, I can do all my scales that I use to try to determine depression, dementia, anxiety, all the things that might be going on with them. Then that way when I follow up with them over the computer via telehealth for the rest of the visits, it makes it very easy. They know then I'm a real person, that I kind of have gotten the nitty gritty, I've kind of met them, and it makes it a lot easier to formulate relationships and to have that collaboration with my patients when I do it that way.

Thank you so much for joining me. I'm Amber Hoberg, and I hope that you found these tips useful for your clinical practice and your patient care.

Amber Hoberg, MSN, APRN, PMHNP-BC, is a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP-BC) with extensive experience spanning various clinical settings and populations. She holds a master’s degree in advanced practice nursing, specializing in Family Psychiatric Mental Health, obtained from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in 2010. Currently based in Hillsboro, Oregon, at Visionary Psychiatry, Amber serves as a PMHNP-BC, focusing on nursing home and group home settings. She also practices at Morning Star Family Medicine PLLC in Floresville, Texas, where she practices and manages medication regimens for residents across outpatient, nursing home, and group home settings. At Northeast/Downtown Baptist Hospital in San Antonio, she manages acute psychiatric care in an inpatient setting.