With the advancement of the COVID-19 virus, many measures are being put in place to halt its progression, including drive-thru testing locations. Despite Inspire Health on Warren Parkway being the first facility to offer drive-thru testing in Frisco last week, Dr. Bijas Benjamin with Inspire Health explains that little testing has been done.

“We have probably done a little over 100 patients this week, which is a lot less than we expected,” Benjamin said. I feel like there’s a lot of barriers on getting patients into the testing center. We are trying to make it as easy as possible for their primary care doctors: there’s a form that’s loaded onto my website inspire-Texas.com where physicians can go and download the form and then we get it and we do the rest of the processing. Once we do the testing the results go back to their doctor, it doesn’t have to be a primary care doctor and so that’s the process.”

Should an increase in testing occur, Benjamin says that Inspire Health has more tests to accommodate patients.

“We have about 500 test kits so far and that’s growing,” Benjamin said. “We are being sent a little over 200 testers weekly and that’s been extremely helpful.”

After patients are swabbed for the virus at Inspire Health, samples are sent to local laboratories for testing.

“Well we work with any laboratory that’s willing to, but our biggest partner so far has been Quest Diagnostics. We collect the sample, we keep it in the refrigerator and whenever it’s ready to be shipped, most of the time they ship the very same day, we send it to one of our locals Quest laboratories. They have I believe two facilities here in town where they are doing the testing and within about 48 hours we get a result, and then the results are sent to their doctors and the patients are notified what the results are.”