NewYork-Presbyterian builds out telemedicine psychiatry and express care services
NewYork-Presbyterian has revealed a pair of new telemedicine options for psychiatric and express care services that build out its existing NYP OnDemand telehealth suite.
NYP went live with Express Care at its Cornell and LMH campuses, which replaces in-person encounters with a video visit to slash admission-to-discharge times from an average 2.5 hours to 31 minutes, according to NYP chief innovation officer Peter Fleischut, MD.
NYP also launched a telepsychiatry service so emergency department patients don’t have to come back in for a follow-up visit; this option reduced wait times from 24 hours down to under 60 minutes.
CIO Daniel Barchi and chief innovation officer Peter Fleischut, MD, will participate in a joint Healthcare IT News and NewYork-Presbyterian #HealthyTechTalk Tweet chat on June 8, 2017 at 1 p.m. EST.
Express Care (which NYP counts along with Urgent Care via the NYP Emergency Deparments services as one prong) is one piece of NYP’s five-pronged approach, CIO Daniel Barchi said. The others include Second Opinion, Virtual Visits, Digital Consults and NYP's Mobile Stroke Treamtent Unit.
The second opinion service enables patients to get the viewpoint of another doctor across 80 specialties, while clinicians use the follow-up tool to conduct virtual visits for post-surgery and other select situations.
NYP's digital consult prong, meanwhile, encompasses telepsychiatry and telestroke. Fleischut said the telestroke service can save 7 minutes of treatment time, or about 140 million brain cells.
When someone calls 911 from anywhere in Manhattan, NYP can send its Mobile Stroke Treatment Unit, which is complementary to the telestroke service, in an ambulance equipped with a CT scan machine to diagnose and, if need be, treat the patient on the spot.
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“Developing people and processes and working with technology has allowed us to scale NYP OnDemand and change how go about delivering care,” Fleischut added.
For its approach, NYP takes a best-of-breed to technologies, including American Well’s telehealth platform, Grand Rounds tools for the second opinions piece, Cisco products for peer-to-peer interactions, among others.
“We pick the right technology for what we’re doing,” Barchi said. “Technology is not the focus of the energy and efforts — that’s improving patient experience and satisfaction.”
Moving forward, NYP aims to make 20 percent of all visits virtual. “We’ve grown 100 percent in volume every month,” Fleischut said, since it originally piloted NYP OnDemand in 2015.
Barchi added that the ability to reach out to patients across the US enables NewYork-Presbyterian doctors and specialists to focus on being doctors and specialists.
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Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com
