What You Need to Know:
– The Maryland State Medical Society (MedChi), which represents 22,000 doctors, today urged the state of Maryland to help protect healthcare workers and others from the novel coronavirus by keeping sick people AWAY from doctors’ offices and instead assess and treat patients through virtual visits.
– MedChi has provided doctors with telehealth capabilities enabled by DrFirst’s Backline care collaboration tool. Backline enables physicians to conduct telehealth sessions, without requiring patients to download an app or complete a cumbersome registration process.
The Maryland State Medical Society (MedChi), which represents 22,000 doctors, today urged the state of Maryland to help protect healthcare workers and others from COVID-19 by keeping sick people AWAY from doctors’ offices. Instead, they say doctors should assess and treat patients through virtual visits – specifically, seeing patients through video calls.
MedChi has provided doctors with telehealth capabilities enabled by a Rockville-based healthcare technology company DrFirst’s Backline care collaboration tool. Backline allows physicians to conduct telehealth sessions, without requiring patients to download an app or complete a cumbersome registration process. Backline is a full care collaboration platform that allows physician practices to share information with other clinicians and patients through secure channels that comply with HIPAA requirements to protect patients’ health information.
Impact of Leveraging Telehealth to Prevent Spread of COVID-19
Noting the important role of social distancing to help prevent the spread of coronavirus, Congress, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and private insurance companies are supporting the expanded use of telehealth for patient care. Telehealth can allow a patient with coronavirus to receive treatment without risking healthcare worker exposure, and other patients in the office from contamination.
“MedChi endorses the use of telehealth and secure messaging to help Maryland physicians assess and treat patients through virtual visits to reduce exposure to the coronavirus. We chose the Backline product in our CTO for continuity of care and to reduce the risk of exposure,” said Gene Ransom, MedChi CEO. “We urge the State of Maryland to help healthcare workers have access to this urgently needed service to all of the physician practices in the state,” Ransom notes that Backline also supports the Maryland Primary Care Program (MDPCP) and CTOs by allowing clinicians to provide 24/7 access for patients and their care teams for urgent and emergent care.
MedChi and DrFirst currently collaborate in additional ways to help physician practices as they care for their patients. DrFirst’s iPrescribe is the first mobile e-prescribing app to allow Maryland clinicians to access the state’s Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) data to help control the opioid crisis, through a partnership with MedChi and CRISP, the state’s Health Information Exchange that operates the PDMP. In addition, the State of Maryland recently awarded DrFirst a grant to equip paramedics in two counties with Backline EMS so they can have real-time access to patients’ medication histories and a secure way to text hospitals with patient information.
