Communicate With Your Doctor Via The Web

The National Physicians DataSource (NPDS), publisher of The Little Blue Book, the directory of US physicians, has taken the wraps off a Web portal that acts as a free messaging gateway between patients and their physicians.

Rather than wait for every physician in the US to hook up to the Internet, the firm has created a Web portal that allows e-mail to be generated to those practices and physicians who are online to the Net, and to generate a fax for those medical staff who are not online.

Robert Heft, a spokesperson for the firm, told MWT that the MDhub service, as it is known, allows patients to look up their physician and send them a message, requesting an appointment, for example, or filing for a repeat prescription.

"It’s designed for non-urgent items and, since it’s free to use, means that Web users don’t have to spend time on the phone waiting for their physician’s secretary to answer," he said.

Heft added that many physicians don’t like the Internet because of the potential volume of e-mail they might receive. With a fax system, it’s a lot easier, he said, as it’s not an open-ended communication from a patient.

"The MDhub service is for routine stuff, like appointments and prescription reorders. This frees up the physician’s phone lines for more important information," he said.

The system was shown for the first time at the recent American College of Physicians Annual Session in Atlanta, and has been under beta testing with selected physicians across the US for the last few months.

Heft said that the system was originally designed for one particular doctor’s practice in the US, but was developed further when it was realized what powerful facilities it offered.

"As well as being useful for patients on the Web, the service is useful for workers in an open plan office, or who work in cubicles, since they don’t have to discuss personal medical affairs on the phone - they can simply use the Web for a private message to their doctor," he said.

Each physician has their own set of pages on MDhub, which is accessed either through an index or via the direct address of "www.mdhub.com/doctor’s-10-digit-phone-number."

Using the Little Blue Book database, each MessageCenter page on the site is pre-filled with all of the medical practice information.

Heft said that the specific information includes all physicians in the practice, all office locations and all managed care plan affiliations, meaning that users of the service do not have to set the system up for their own physician.

MDhub’s Web site is at http://www.mdhub.com.