WILMINGTON – As demand for telemedicine surges during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the North Carolina Medical Society is teaming with a Wilmington startup incubator to offer a remote solution for healthcare providers.
The society and Greenlight Ventures have launched the platform called Presence, and it will be made available free of charge for distribution by medical societies as well as health systems through June 30. The platform already is linked to lab service providers such as LabCorp and Mako, according to its website.
“Originally created as a way to reach patients remotely, telehealth needs during the COVID-19 pandemic have skyrocketed,” the NCMS noted in a recent blog post. “Physician practices are working to get telehealth platforms set up and running so they can continue to see patients.”
Presence is designed to help physicians deal with “the challenge of providing patient care while there are shelter in place orders in effect. Some of the population may also be infected with COVID-19 and physicians want to reduce exposure,” according to its website.
Presence
“The Platform provides a central portal where patients can schedule a telemedicine visit with their provider. Patients can look up their provider either by practice name or provider name. Patients are provided a calendar of times that the physician has blocked off to provide telemedicine or phone based visits. Physicians receive a notification of scheduled visits and have a dashboard for initiation and management of visits.”
The platform includes:
- Patient self-scheduling
- Text and email communications
- Audio and video “visits” between providers and patients
Presence “is meant to be used alongside a practice’s existing EHR [electronic health records] solutions in an effort to reduce disruption,” according to the announcement from Greenlight Ventures and the NCMS.
Greenlight Ventures, which has a team of some 15 people including several developers according to its website, said it had shifted focus from other projects to bring Presence online. The new offering was built in part around current products including “The Recovery Program” which focuses on the opiod epedemic.
“The Recovery Platform has been a proven technology partner in the fight against the Opioid Epidemic; so I knew exactly who to go to when we now needed a quick and easy way to onboard thousands of physicians with telemedicine capabilities,” said Franklin Walker, who is vice president of Rural Health System Innovations for the NCMS, in the announcement.
