It’s Time to Assess Your PPE Needs

From the Texas Medical Association

The Texas Medical Association PPE Portal is your tool to inform state-managed warehouses how much personal protective equipment (PPE) your practice needs. 

As long as you need PPE, use this link to the PPE Portal to refresh your data once per week per practice. These data inform distributors about how much PPE you currently have on hand and how much you use each day.

The PPE Portal is available only for licensed Texas physicians (and nursing homes and home health professionals) who are not hospital-based and who cannot obtain PPE through other channels. The PPE Portal is NOT an order form. Because of the limited supplies and uneven distribution of the PPE, there is no guarantee individual practices will get all – or even some – of what they need.

The data you submit to the TMA PPE Portal are sent to the state’s Hospital Preparedness Program (HPP) partners and Regional Advisory Councils (RACs). The state purchases PPE throughout the worldwide supply chain. The HPPs and RACs are responsible for distributing it. They ship PPE allocated for physicians within their regions to local county medical societies, who then distribute it to individual physician practices. The PPE you receive from the RAC or HPP through the TMA PPE Portal will be free.

A local county medical society or state warehouse will contact you when and if PPE is ready for you to pick up.

If you are not the person who keeps track of this information for your practice, please share this email (with your personal PPE Portal link above) with the staff member or other physician who will enter it for your practice. Please report PPE usage by all staff who regularly need it to interact with patients, including physicians, physician assistants, nurses, and support staff. Coordinate within your practice to make sure it submits only one response, even if your practice has multiple locations.

For more details, see TMA’s updated PPE Distribution FAQ document and check our PPE Status by County webpage.