What Have We Done For You Lately?
Behind the Scenes: The Society
at Work During a Pandemic
by DAVid wroten 1 & Casey Penn
1
executive vice president
From the first executive order that Arkansas’s
Governor, Asa Hutchinson, issued
in March, the Arkansas Medical Society
has been instrumental in supporting
physicians and their patients. From assembling
and distributing a COVID-19 update on an
almost daily basis to running a full-scale side
effort distributing personal protective equipment
(PPE) to clinics across the state, AMS staff
and leadership have been working in uncommon
ways to provide for the needs of members
and non-members alike. Let me offer you a
rare, behind-the-scenes picture of what it has
been like at the Society since mid-March.
COVID-19 Updates
The Society has worked daily to put
pertinent information in front of members.
AMS has shared information on all the various
directives as they have gone out statewide and
has provided links to information on billing,
financial assistance, best practices, and so
much more.
Meetings With Stakeholders
Our meetings with interested stakeholders
and legislators have led to several initiatives.
For instance, we requested that our state’s
insurance department issue directives
suspending insurance practices such as prior
During a conversation with
the governor, I stuck my
neck out just a little bit and
said, “If you’ll just help us
out, we’ll get it to them.”
authorizations, audits, and similar things that
take up a clinic’s valuable resources during
a time when we need everyone focused on
caring for patients.
Protecting Telemedicine
Legislative Efforts
The first order by Gov. Hutchinson relaxed
the telemedicine law requirement that you
had to have either an in-person or a faceto-face
audio-visual visit with a patient to
establish a doctor-patient relationship. That
opened the door for people to establish that
relationship through nothing but a telephone.
After reviewing a draft of the executive order,
the AMS was successful in getting the governor
to change the order to include a requirement
to have access to a patient’s medical records
from a physician. In other words, you could not
just have the patient fill out an online health
questionnaire and then use that to establish
the doctor-patient relationship. That is not
good medicine.
Reimbursement Provisions,
Relaxing Liability Fears
Once the first Arkansas case was
diagnosed, it was like someone turned off the
lights. Patients stopped going to their doctor
and began putting off care that they needed.
The governor’s office was encouraging people
to stay home, and they did. On the other
hand, clinics did not have testing capabilities
and did not want patients coming in. So,
AMS staff immediately reached out to all the
state’s carriers, and within 10 days, all of them
agreed to pay for telephone-only visits at the
same rate as in-person visits. We did this so
that – particularly during the early days of
the pandemic – established patients would
not have to come to the office. This helped
patients to continue receiving needed care
and it helped physicians to keep their doors
open. At the same time, we understood the
concern and uncertainty of treating patients
under these circumstances. AMS and other
health care organizations requested help from
the governor, and he issued an executive order
providing liability protections for the state’s
health care professionals.
PPE Machine
The biggest thing we have been involved in
during the pandemic has been addressing the
need for PPE. Calls started coming in stating
that physicians could no longer order the
protective equipment needed. The supply lines
were overwhelmed with worldwide requests.
On top of that, Arkansas was not getting all it
expected from the national stockpile of PPE,
and what it was getting was going to first
responders, hospitals, nursing homes and
other hot spots. Again, AMS reached out to Gov.
Hutchinson asking for assistance. The governor
had announced that he would buy $30 million
worth of PPE, and then that number went up to
$70 million. During a Saturday morning phone
call, he agreed to allot a percentage of those
purchases to our state’s medical practices.
During a conversation with the governor, I
stuck my neck out just a little bit and said, “If
you’ll just help us out, we’ll get it to them.”
From that point forward, we became
PPE distributors. That is what your AMS staff
has focused on for the past four weeks. A
PPE request form was added to the COVID-19
Update and to the AMS website.
We asked others to spread the word, too,
because one of the promises we made was that
we would not limit this to members only. Under
4 • The Journal of the Arkansas Medical Society www.ArkMed.org