Objective: We assessed the reliability of remote video psychiatric interviews conducted via the internet using narrow and broad bandwidths.
Method: Televideo psychiatric interviews conducted with 42 in-patients with chronic schizophrenia using two bandwidths (narrow, 128 kilobits/s; broad, 2 megabits/s) were assessed in terms of agreement with face-to-face interviews in a test-retest fashion. As a control, agreement was assessed between face-to-face interviews. Psychiatric symptoms were rated using the Oxford version of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), and agreement between interviews was estimated as the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC).
Results: The ICC was significantly lower in the narrow bandwidth than in the broad bandwidth and the control for both positive symptoms score and total score.
Conclusion: While reliability of televideo psychiatric interviews is insufficient using the present narrow-band internet infrastructure, the next generation of infrastructure (broad-band) may permit reliable diagnostic interviews.