The psychiatrists who cover the consult service at UW Medical Center have begun doing consults at Wyoming Medical Center (WMC), a 217 bed hospital and regional trauma center in Casper. WMC is also home to the University of Wyoming’s Family Medicine Residency Program. Wyoming is over 25,000 square miles larger than Washington State, yet the five UWMC faculty increased the total number of psychiatrists licensed to practice in Wyoming by over 10%.

Building on a model pioneered by the UW at Capital Medical Center in Olympia, WMC staff bring a laptop computer directly into the patient’s hospital room and use Zoom, a HIPAA-compliant video conferencing software, to allow “face-to-face” conversations with UWMC providers. Capital Medical Center’s primary need was to help with patients admitted after suicide attempts, as well as to provide better care to involuntarily detained patients who were “boarding” while awaiting an open psychiatry bed. WMC, on the other hand, has a more robust apparatus already in place for suicidal and detained patients, but needs consultants to help with psychiatric manifestations of primary medical issues, as well as primary psychiatric disorders that are interfering with the delivery of medical care.