Press Releases
Freidenrich Breast Center Joins Other Groups at Stanford Hospital and Clinics in Providing Secure RelayHealth Service
Breast Center Patients Will Enjoy Convenience, Access By Communicating With Their Personal Physician Online
Emeryville, CA, November 16, 2005 — RelayHealth Corporation, the nation's premier provider of health plan-reimbursed online doctor-patient communication services, today announced that Stanford Hospital and Clinics' Jill and John Freidenrich Breast Center will join Stanford Family Practice and Stanford Medical Group in offering secure RelayHealth messaging services to patients.
More than 3,100 patients currently use the RelayHealth service to communicate with their Stanford Medical Group or Stanford Family Medicine physician. Similarly, clinicians at the Freidenrich Breast Center will utilize the service to securely communicate with established patients and to write prescriptions online.
"Like our state-of-the-art Cancer Center, RelayHealth is designed with the physical and emotional well-being of patients in mind," said Steve Leibel, MD, medical director, Stanford Cancer Center. "For many of our patients, daily life revolves around their treatment plan—which typically entails office visits, multiple therapies, tests, and medications. By enabling confidential and direct access to their doctors, the RelayHealth service will help patients answer questions and resolve non-urgent healthcare needs with convenience, comfort, and privacy, maximizing the quantity and quality of time available for other life-enhancing activities."
Several leading health carriers reimburse RelayHealth webVisits® — clinically structured online evaluations of a patient's non-urgent symptoms — and will compensate Breast Center physicians conducting eligible webVisit consultations with member patients. Examples of webVisit titles which may prove relevant include "Side Effects of Chemotherapy and Radiation" or "Fatigue".
"I'm excited about the implications for patient care," noted Robert Carlson, MD, a breast cancer specialist at the Freidenrich Breast Center and a Stanford University professor. "From what I've seen, RelayHealth will facilitate more efficient and effective coordination of care among the various providers on a patient's cancer care team, and will help patients attend to the many minor, but frequently time-consuming, issues associated with their treatment plan in comfort and convenience. Surely it can only improve the high quality of care we already provide."
"Stanford Hospital and Clinics is a worldwide leader in advanced patient care. In expanding RelayHealth to the Freidenrich Breast Center, we've gained an important endorsement of the clinical and qualitative benefits our service provides," said Giovanni Colella, MD, president and chief executive officer of RelayHealth. "This move illustrates that secure online communication is an important ally for patients fighting serious illness—not just those with minor ailments."
About RelayHealth Corporation
RelayHealth is the premier provider of payor-reimbursed secure online healthcare communication
services linking patients, healthcare professionals, health plans, and pharmacies. A secure,
clinically structured productivity platform for the medical office, the RelayHealth service
is an emerging online communication standard, interfacing with both commercial and custom-built
electronic medical record systems through the company's Interoperability Toolkit. Research
studies show RelayHealth reduces phone traffic and increases physician productivity through
modular features like the webVisit® clinical consultation and
eScript electronic prescribing — one reason
leading health plans nationwide increasingly reimburse providers who use the RelayHealth
service. For healthcare consumers, RelayHealth improves convenience, access and communication
with their own doctors. For information, visit www.relayhealth.com.
