Less than a year after launching digital and mobile healthcare, NewYork-Presbyterian Health System says its investment in more self-service web tools for patients is paying off.
Specifically, more delivery of digital and mobile healthcare is helping NewYork-Presbyterian treat stroke victims faster and give patients quicker and faster ways to see doctors among other metrics.
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 launching NYP OnDemand has delivered improved patient care and speeded up patient access to physicians across a number of areas, NewYork-Presbyterian chief information officer Daniel Barchi told attendees at the recent Telehealth and Remote Patient Monitoring Summit in Atlanta.
There multiple areas where digital and mobile health initiatives are beginning to have an impact including:
- Better and faster treatment of stroke victims. Telestroke programs connect regional hospitals with a neurologist who can rapidly evaluate a computed tomography, or CT image and consult with the physician on-site on the best course of action. Nationally, telestroke programs cut anywhere from five to 30 minutes off the door-to-treatment time, which has been shown to improve patient outcomes, Barchi told attendees.
NewYork-Presbyterian took this care one step further by creating a mobile stroke treatment unit, a specialized emergency vehicle complete with CT imaging capability and dispatched by the New York City 911 System via the New York fire department directly to a patient showing signs of a stroke. By wirelessly transmitting the CT scan to a NewYork-Presbyterian neuroradiologist, this significantly reduces the amount of time lapsed from the onset of symptoms to the delivery of care, Additionally, the MSTU contains medications specific to diagnosing and treating strokes, allowing the team to deliver the right drug immediately upon diagnosis, Barchi told attendees.
Since making telestroke a part of its mobile health program, more than 60 patients have been seen and the average time for NewYork-Presbyterian doctors to diagnose has been reduced by eight minutes.
- Emergency care. Patients arriving at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center are given the option of a virtual visit through real-time video interactions with a clinician, after having an initial triage and medical screening exam, Barchi told attendees.
This is done in a private room with a webcam/monitor, providing patients unmatched convenience and reduced time spent in the emergency department. In the past five months more than 100 patients have moved through this process in an average of 35 minutes from arrival to discharge. Previously the same process may have taken as long as two hours.
- Faster access to behavioral health specialists. It used to take a patient looking to see NewYork-Presbyterian mental or behavioral health system up to a full day to schedule and confirm an appointment. But NYP OnDemand has reduced the wait time to under 10 minutes, Barchi told attendees.
- Faster and more convenient ways for patients to schedule before and after surgical visits. “NewYork-Presbyterian is also beginning to make pre-surgical visits with anesthesiologists and post-surgical checkups with physicians more convenient by scheduling these appointments as virtual video visits,” he told attendees. “In addition to being more efficient for the physician, they can turn a patient’s four-hour experience of traveling and waiting for a physician into a 10-minute video appointment.”
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.
“With the creation of digital emergency room capability, NewYork-Presbyterian is constantly innovating,” Barchi told attendees.
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