Treating patients over the phone

RNs are not licensed to diagnose or treat.

Where I work, there are a few routine, low risk conditions that allow us to request telephone treatment for medicine, which is reviewed & signed off by a physician. Things like a nasal spray for hay fever. Patients expect the convenience. I don’t work in the physician’s office, but in a call center, where the patient calls a central number and we act as a front office. The same type of thing occurs in private physician offices everywhere. Nurses or MAs gather data, communicate it to a physician who writes the prescription. In the system I work in, all of the patients records are right in front of us on computer, as opposed to doctors offices where they employ a separate person to pull a chart, which gets routed to the doctor’s inbox, where it will sit until the physician gets a spare moment.

Most physicians prefer an office visit. There are more times than not that the patient refuses to be evaluated for a routine problem and insist on a message to the doctor instead for a call back.

Medical Economics had a great article about this http://www.memag.com/memag/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=379588&searchString=older%20doctors%20and%20telephone%20medicine

But the whole time I read it I kept thinking “What if this person on the other end of the phone doesnt have IBS , but has Crohn’s disease”?

Gentlemen, renew your malpractice!

No surprise the HMO’s are pushing it. They won’t lose their license or go to jail and they save money. Its win-win.