Imagine being more available to help your primary care colleagues with challenging cases while eliminating interruptions throughout your day.
After getting set up on Virtual Hallway, your primary care colleagues can book phone calls with you… at times that work for you. That means both you and your colleague are in the right headspace to share your expertise.
Use your appointments for the most pressing cases, while still being able to support patients with lower acuity problems. Have the peace of mind knowing that if a primary care colleague needs your advice on a case, that they have a mechanism to reach you.
Use Virtual Hallway to regularly consult with a family doc about a patient with a complex issue. Specialists have found that the primary care provider is able to effectively care for that patient with their guided insights on Virtual Hallway, rather than have that patient referred to their waitlist.
We have heard the laments of cumbersome and time-consuming solutions, and are proud to boast a 4.9/5 satisfaction rating from specialist physicians. Easy, smooth, quick, and friendly are the words we hear when we ask specialists about using Virtual Hallway. By connecting with a primary care provider over the phone, you avoid the back-and forth than often comes with asynchronous solutions.
Make yourself available to primary care clinicians outside of your network for compensated consults. Our team assists and executes promoting your availability on Virtual Hallway to any area or network you are interested in accepting VH consults from. We facilitate e-faxing, OMA related advertisements, and other means of informing clinicians on how to access your support.
With one of the fastest growing CME Lecture series in the country, we handle all accreditation, sponsorship, hosting and outreach about CME lectures. Just let us know you’re interested in participating as a speaker, and we’ll handle the rest. Learn more about our CMEs.
Consulting on cases is work, and being fairly compensated for providing patient care is important. With Virtual Hallway phone consults, we ensure that all eligible fee for service physicians get reimbursed for their work.
Good passwords are key to protecting sensitive information. You may be using passwords that seem to be strong and that fit those common password rules that websites force you into. But, how truly secure are your passwords?
You might be surprised to learn that most passwords under 9 characters in length can be easily broken within hours or seconds, even with use of uppercase + lowercase + numbers + symbols!
The good news is, if you add just a few more characters, the time required to crack a password jumps substantially. A 12 character password that uses upper/lowercase + numbers + symbols can take upwards of 30,000 years to break with current algorithms. See this chart which illustrates this concept.
So, here are 5 password tips that Virtual Hallway recommends you to consider the next time you are setting a password (and ideally that you should use to update your existing passwords).
Choose a password with 12 or more characters. One handy trick is to use a passphrase where you have a sentence that you like or is meaningful to you, and then basing the password off of the first (or last) word of that sentence. For example, take the sentence “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plains.” If you take the first letter of each word “trissmotp” that is a good start for now.
Add in a mix of upper and lower case letters as well as to add in special characters (e.g. #*@&#-), it will significantly strengthen your password. You could even pop in your favourite typed emoji ; )
Do not include information that is personally identifying or that a hacker can pick up through your online profiles. That means nothing about the school or university you went to, your age, your pet’s name, etc.
There is a surprising amount of information that gets leaked from all sorts of websites. In fact, if you type in your email address to check if you’ve been pwned (click here to learn what I’m talking about) chances are at least one of them has been tied to a leak. This means that hackers may have access to your old passwords (along with other personal information). If you have (or even if you haven’t) you should renew/re-create your passwords regularly and DO NOT reuse old ones. And avoid adding incremental changes to the same password. That is a classic trick that all hackers know well (e.g. springtime2013, which you change to, springtime2014 and then to springtime2015, etc).
All of these rules make passwords stronger, but you might be thinking “how in the world can I remember all of these passwords”? In comes the password manager. Most password managers have been around for years and the reputable ones have a strong track record and have built in a high level of security. Once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start using one sooner. You can find reviews of the top password managers with a quick search, but typically the top options tend to include: Nordpass, LastPass and 1Password.
It is important to take your passwords seriously, especially in the healthcare field. To wrap up our sample password we started earlier lets add more characters, upper/lowercase, numbers, special characters. So our end product might be something like “TrIsSmOtP#05”. Voila, your password just become significantly stronger!
It's simple. Log in to your account, click Account -> Security -> Password Settings. Enter your Current Password and New Password and the click "Confirm Change Password". That's It! Consider activating Two Factor Authentication while you are at it to further enhance the security of your account.
Practitioners on Virtual Hallway spend a lot of time thinking how best to help their patients. We often get queries about what types of problems make a good consult request. Having effective consult requests can streamline the entire consultation process, allowing more quality time spent problem solving through the patient’s problem.
So what are some examples of effective consult requests? We’ve gathered a few tips examples and tips from Virtual Hallway General Internists:
Often labs come back abnormal, but the direction to go next is unclear. This is a common and effective use of phone consultation. Consulting on this can lead to a faster diagnosis, avoid unnecessary tests and in some cases, reassure patients.
CHF is a complex problem, and made even more complex as individuals with CHF typically have multiple other medical problems that might be exacerbated by some medications. This type of problem is a excellent example of where consultation can help optimize a patients treatment.
Whether it be for atrial fibrillation or venous thromboembolism, stopping, starting and titrating anticoagulants can be tricky. This is where talking through matters with an Internist can help make this process as efficient as possible.
Patient’s symptoms don’t always lead to an obvious diagnosis. Often, it takes a lot of history taking, physical exam and investigation to figure out what might be going on. Consulting with a General Internist during this process can help narrow the diagnostic possibilities down, and also help in selecting the investigations with the highest yield for a patient’s presenting problems.
Making a diagnosis is part one. Choosing the best treatment is step two. Working through the treatment options for a patient’s diagnosis is an excellent exercise to do with a General Internist.
While these are some examples of situations where consultation is appropriate, there are no hard and fast rules about consulting. A consult should be an option whenever there is uncertainty about a patient’s condition. Two heads are better than one.
