Teleconsultation for Coronavirus. Medical records for Family Physicians ready

“The recommendation if you experience suspicious symptoms is not to go immediately to the doctor’s office, hospital or emergency room, but to call your doctor and follow up with his or her questions to define your risk profile. All GPS are alerted and aligned Thanks to a common platform, “emphasizes prof. Cricelli, SIMG President

VISITS ONLY IF NECESSARY, TELEPHONE CONTACT SHOULD BE PREFERRED

SIMG-Italian Society of General Medicine and FIMMG-Italian Federation of General Practitioners have created a coordination for information and organization interventions for Italy’s 46 thousand family physicians. As of Monday, 26 thousand medical records from 35 thousand Family Physicians’ offices offer real-time updated information and tools on the epidemic situation of Covid-19, practical advice and scientific updates managed by SIMG and FIMMG with their Presidents, Claudio Cricelli and Silvestro Scotti respectively.

“First of all – explains Prof. Claudio Cricelli, SIMG President – we are facilitating the dissemination of documents that come from the Ministries, the Regions, and the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, so that all physicians will be in possession of any updates and all necessary information as soon as possible. We are then giving maximum visibility to practical recommendations on how to behave.

We also worked on guidelines indicating how to do telephone triage with patients, an operation that has become indispensable“.

MEDICAL RECORDS AS A TELECONSULTATION TOOL

As of this week, moreover, at the initiative of SIMG, a new service has also started. The medical record, already a traditional tool for the family physician to reconstruct each patient’s profile, becomes the basis for teleconsultation. The doctor, in fact, offers the patient a questionnaire to understand the symptoms he or she is experiencing at that moment and relates them to the clinical information in the chart.

All the previous elements that make up the individual’s medical history (whether or not the patient has had the vaccine, any chronic diseases, the results of recent tests, whether he or she has already had the flu), related to the possible risk factors related to Covid-19, will allow the family doctor to assess the specific situation in detail. In other words, the physician makes the answers to the questionnaire interact with the medical record, creating an integration between the two sources of information to have a complete assessment of the patient.

A CALL FOR GUIDANCE AND INTERVENTION

The recommendation, in fact, if you experience suspicious symptoms, is not to go immediately to the doctor’s office, hospital, or emergency room, but to call your doctor and follow his or her questions to establish the risk profile. All general practice physicians have been provided with a telephone triage card in these hours to be used to ask patients suspected of Covid-19 infection questions by telephone with which to make an initial diagnosis. The GP himself can then recommend any further step to follow, determining whether it is necessary to go to his office. “There is no absolute watershed to indicate when visitation is necessary – stress Prof. Cricelli – Such a decision is a result of the Doctor’s Knowledge of the person. Age, Possible Chronic Diseases, Health Status Go to Constitte Some of the Elements on the Basis of Which the Physician Makes His decision.

There are no fixed rules: This is People’s Medicine, It is decioned on a case-by-house basis“.