"Digital Doctors - Health Systems Aiming to Expand Telemedicine" - David Reich-Hale
Regional health systems are expanding what they predict will be the next frontier in treatment: telemedicine, a form of remote care where doctors interact with patients via a phone, tablet or other devices with a camera. Mount Sinai Health System offers tele-urgent care to its employees and expects to launch the service for its patients in 2019. Insurance payments weigh on the urgent-care business. Abe Warshaw, MD, senior vice president of access services for the Mount Sinai Health System, said, “The insurance aspect of remote urgent care is a work in progress, and we want to be careful with the rollout until this is sorted out.” Health systems launching tele-urgent care services are competing directly with insurers offering their own product, often at a lower cost to patients. “We look at telehealth as part of our standard business offerings, and for some patients it makes life much easier,” said Bruce Darrow, MD, senior vice president of information technology and chief medical information officer for the Mount Sinai Health System. “Why should a patient take a half-day off work, travel an hour by subway to the Upper East Side to have a five-minute conversation with me as part of a follow up appointment? In some cases we can check in via video, and it’s just as effective.”
— Abraham L. Warshaw, MD, Senior Vice President, Medical Director, Access Services, Mount Sinai Health System, Associate Professor, Population Health Science and Policy, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
— Bruce J. Darrow, MD, Senior Vice President, Information Technology, Chief Medical Information Officer, Mount Sinai Health System, Associate Professor, Medicine, Cardiology, Population Health Science and Policy, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai