NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital has launched Pediatric Urgent Care, a new online service from NYP OnDemand, the health system’s digital healthcare program.
“NewYork-Presbyterian is always looking for new ways to make our care more easily accessible to families,” says Dr. Rahul Sharma, emergency physician-in-chief, NewYork Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and chief of the division of emergency medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. “With the launch of Pediatric Urgent Care, families can now see a trained and experienced pediatric emergency physician from the comfort of their home.”
Available seven days a week from 6:00 p.m. to midnight on both NYP.org and the NewYork-Presbyterian mobile app, parents and caregivers can see and speak directly with a board-certified pediatric emergency physician via video-conference. After assessing the child the doctor may provide advice, treatment and medication or determine that the patient requires an emergent or in-person evaluation.
“Nothing is more difficult than when your child is sick or injured,” said Dr. Shari Platt, chief of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and an associate professor of clinical pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Our goal is to deliver immediate guidance and advice to a concerned parent, and to provide children with the best possible medical care. This new Pediatric Urgent Care telehealth service is a convenient and fast way to diagnose and provide a treatment plan for common conditions such as fever, cough, vomiting, pink eye and skin rashes.”
The service covers patients located in New York, though the health system plans to expand coverage in the coming months to New Jersey, Connecticut and Florida. All patient information and virtual visits with a doctor are private, secure and HIPAA-compliant, says NewYork-Presbyterian.
NewYork-Presbyterian launched NYP OnDemand in July 2016 as a telehealth initiative that enables patients, doctors and other healthcare providers to perform a broad 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.