Health IT

American Academy of Family Physicians picks Zipnosis in its first telemedicine collaboration

In a phone interview with Steven Waldren, director of the AAFP's Alliance for eHealth Innovation, he said the collaboration with Zipnosis was the group's first with a telemedicine company. It selected the company following an RFP process.

 

Zipnosis has agreed to its first collaboration with medical society the American Academy of Family Physicians. AAFP has been working with the company to develop an onboarding site for small and medium-sized family physician practices and plans to offer the platform to members later this year after an initial pilot.

In a phone interview with Steven Waldren, director of the AAFP’s Alliance for eHealth Innovation, he said the collaboration with Zipnosis was the group’s first with a telemedicine company. It selected the company following an RFP process.

Zipnosis is really thinking about the physician. They’ve thought about what physicians need on a practical level, including evidence-based medicine, guidelines to care,” Waldren said.

The strategic partnership stemmed from the results of a 2017 AAFP member survey designed to identify new programs and services, according to Rebecca Hafner-Fogarty, Zipnosis senior vice president of policy and strategy in an email.  She noted that a theme that surfaced from the study was the demand for a virtual care service that addresses the unique needs of family physicians.

Hafner-Fogarty said that although Zipnosis is currently doing a pilot with AAFP, the telemedicine service will be available to AAFP members later this year. AAFP and Zipnosis will license the software and pay a monthly per-seat service fee for the physicians and other providers using the platform.

One challenge that continues to remain an issue is how to integrate data from Zipnosis and other technology companies into the electronic health record, Waldren said. It reflects the much wider industry issue of interoperability.

Our members use 30 different EHRs. We are trying to focus on making it better each time,” Waldren said. “We are pushing for our members in general to have open APIs to boost interop among the membership.”

Illustration: nicescene, Getty Images

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