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Sammamish Diabetes and Lipid Clinic, PLLC                                                  
A medical home for patients with cardiovascular risk.                                                   

Virtual Visits

Virtual Visits are visits that can be completed using internet tools without the actual face-to-face presence of the physician and the patient in the same physical location.  They are appropriate for established patients only, and are generally used for follow-up of established problems where response to a change in  medication or change in lifestyle needs to be documented.  Virtual Visits can also be used  when the patient has a symptom or problem that may not require a physical examination for the physician to come to a conclusion about.  I generally use an automated history-taking tool called Instant Medical History to structure the interview and organize the patients' responses to the interview questions.   This is the same tool I ask patients to use  before a regular face-to-face visit to capture and organize the patients' story and concerns. 

When virtual visits are implemented,  I will receive a notification of the Instant Medical History interview with the patient, and will post a response to the interview on the secure site.  The patient will be emailed to check the site for the response.  The response might be instructions to change a medication, a new prescription, instructions for behavior change, or a request that the patient schedule a face-to-face visit. 

Virtual Visits are not yet covered by most insurance companies, so are charged separately to the patient.  The $50.00 per patient per year secure internet access fee covers any and all virtual visits for a patient in a given year. 

At this time, Virtual Visits are not yet available. They should be fully operational and available sometime in 2008.

 

 

 

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