ST. FRANCIS ADDS LINK TO NATIONAL WEB SITE TO LOCAL INTERNET SITE

Is that rash on your 6-month old just diaper rash or something more serious? Should you be concerned about a persistent cough? What could be causing your back to hurt? Where can you learn more about a recently diagnosed medical condition?

Free information on these and other medical concerns is only a click away, said Mike Anders, a planning specialist at St. Francis Medical Center. St. Francis recently became the first hospital in Missouri to join forces with AmericasDoctor.Com to provide the community with more information about health care topics.

"People often want information about things but don't know if they are serious enough to bother their doctor about," Anders said. Or a situation may arise in the middle of the night. Or it may be a problem a person is embarrassed about.

By logging onto AmericasDoctor.Com (which can be accessed through www.americasdoctor.com or through the St. Francis Web site at www.sfmc.net), people not only can look up information through the site's large medical library, but also ask questions through an online chat with a doctor.

"AmericasDoctor.Com has a call center staffed with 200 to 300 board-certified physicians," Anders said. Those doctors are available 24 hours per day to answer questions in real-time online chats.

Just click on the Ask the Doctor link, register, then ask your question. The site will let you know how many people are ahead of you. In an visit to the site at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, a question was answered in less than two minutes. A question asked about noon was behind 42 other questions and it took about an hour before getting an online response.

If you do have to wait for the chat, you can spend the time visiting the other sections of AmericasDoctor.Com, which include a library of information on health topics, a drug encyclopedia, medical dictionary and communities. The latter is groupings of information, chat rooms and message boards about various health subjects.

The online doctors do not diagnose, treat or prescribe medicine for conditions, Anders emphasized. Instead, they provide information and suggests links to other sources of information about the subject of your question.

For instance, Kim Groves, a market communications specialist at St. Francis, said she logged on after one of her children was scratched by a cat. The online doctor described how to tell superficial scratches from more serious ones.

If the question is about a subject for which St. Francis has a program, such as diabetes or open-heart surgery, the online doctor will refer the people from zip codes in the hospital's 24-county service area to the hospital's Web site.

"In addition to general information about a topic, people are referred to a local resource," Anders said.

Anders said the online chat aspect of AmericasDoctor.Com was what impressed St. Francis officials when they were looking for a health-related Web site to link to.

Anders said a key element of both St. Francis' mission statement and its strategic initiative is providing education to the community on health care topics.

Providing a way to chat online with a physician is a great communication tool, but one that St. Francis couldn't provide on its own, Anders said.

This partnership provides that 24-hour access to an online physician as well as putting a large and varied amount of health information at a person's fingertips.

The partnering with AmericasDoctor.Com will also allow St. Francis to sponsor online chats with local doctors on the hospital's Web site. Anders said the hospital hopes to do this quarterly.

St. Francis has been updating its Web site, established in 1995. It is adding a link to AmericasDoctor.Com and is expanding the site's list of physicians.

"We used to just have a list of doctors with hospital privileges," Anders said. "Now the list includes a page for each doctor with a picture, address, phone number and biographical information and a link to their Web site if they have one."

The pages can be accessed by the doctor's name, by specialties or by city.

"We think AmericasDoctor.Com is an wonderful way to get up-to-the-minute, confidential information in a one-on-one online chat," Anders said.