All practices dealing with CMS/Medicare should review Coverage and Payment Related to COVID-19 Medicare. CMS billing guidance for remote contact can be found towards end of page 3.
It would be a helpful to add Video Conferencing as first feature of OpenEMR telehealth project. At minimum it can automatically create an encounter, record the start and end times and optionally let MD record the session for creating a note later.
Thank you @robert.down for establishing this as a topic.
There are many options to choose for telemedicine, the first being a telephone, with many options popping up. The new emergency rules allow easing of HIPAA standards and payment restrictions and making everyone take a look at this option.
I am happy to provide a secure HIPAA-compliant telemedicine platform for the community while the students build out a formal OpenEMR product. MedEx TM Server In its present form it is a stand alone service but it will be easy to integrate it into an encounter form. I’ll share that code as soon as it is done to help the process.
Although this implementation is encrypted and 1:1 conversations are handed off in a P2P fashion, to be truly HIPAA compliant, the room must be locked with a password…
My understanding is that Jerry wanted to build a webrtc add-on for local installs that ran through the portal. This implementation is built off of Jitsi, an open source webRTC offering and is not through the portal. Rocket Chat is also built from that I believe. I’m sure Brady could spin up a docker yaml file with an openemr-modified jitsi install, but until then, feel free to use this one. It even has an iOS and Android app - also from the Jitsi opensource community, which is sponsored by 8x8, a for-profit company.
Note: Firefox is a little quirky with webRTC but Chrome works great. And no, you do not have to sign-up for MedEx to use this TM service while we wait for an official OpenEMR version. You are welcome to sign-up, but it is not required…
Ray
Somehow i’ve got to find some time to get this project off the ground.
I hope if I get the structural code done for this as a module then others would join in to help get it to a production ready feature.