Its early on for implementation but a year of planning for a major expansion of digital healthcare is paying off for NewYork-Presbyterian Health System, which includes NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medical College and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

In July, NewYork-Presbyterian launched NYP OnDemand, a new telehealth initiative that enables patients, doctors and other healthcare providers to perform a broader range of web-based healthcare transactions.

Those transactions include using NYP OnDemand to schedule a second opinion within the NewYork-Presbyterian system, inter-hospital consults between patients and doctors within different departments, scheduling follow-up appointments and emergency room consultations.

Since then then the digital healthcare service has logged about 1,100 visits, says NewYork-Presbyterian chief innovation officer Dr. Peter Fleischut. But more important and setting an example other hospitals and health systems can learn from, is the cooperation and advance planning that went into launching a system wide digital healthcare program that employs 29,000 NewYork-Presbyterian workers and serves more than 2 million patients annually in just about 8 weeks.

There wasnt a major department that wasnt involved, Fleischut told attendees earlier this month at the Digital Health Conference in New York. Over the course of a years time Fleischut put together a working group of executives that represented 12 major departments that ranged from nursing care and information technology to legal and compliance. The group spent the year writing a business plan for the system wide digital healthcare program that outlined goals, objectives as well as troubleshooting potential problems. Once the business metrics were outlined the team next set about working with NewYork-Presbyterians information technology staff on a litany of issues dealing with budgets, systems integration and an implementation time frame.

With a year-long planning process and implementation plan in place NewYork-Presbyterian was able to roll out a robustand multifaceteddigital and mobile health plan in about two months. For example, because NewYork-Presbyterian had a standing digital healthcare committee that represented the health systems core departments, it took only 30 days to interview nearly three dozen telehealth vendors and narrow the selection down to a pair of companies including Avizia, which provides the technology for NYP OnDemand.

NYP OnDemand is a telehealth initiative that enables patients, doctors and other healthcare providers to perform a broader range of web-based healthcare transactions such as scheduling a second opinion within the NewYork-Presbyterian system, inter-hospital consults between patients and doctors within different departments and scheduling follow-up appointments and emergency room consultations.

The health system also has a telehealth agreement with American Well for NYP OnDemand, a digital doctor visitation service.

So far about 2,000 patients have downloaded the mobile app that connects patients to an emergency room physician for treatment of a minor illness and routine follow-up appointments. While the NewYork-Presbyterian digital healthcare program is just getting underway, the health system is beginning to see some benefits. For example, new telehealth options have reduced the time it takes a patient to check in, wait and finally see a doctor from an average of 2.4 hours to about 31 minutes, Fleischut told attendees.

The timing is now to partner more with the consumer, Fleischut told attendees.