The New York City-based Mount Sinai Heath System has announced the launch of various telehealth initiatives, aiming to improve care without having patients set foot in a doctor’s office.
Among the first telehealth pilot projects to get underway, the Primary Care Program, will allow physicians in the Mount Sinai Doctors Faculty Practice to offer remote patient consults using a digital connection. What’s more, patients can now consult remotely with physicians through the telestroke program under the leadership of Aaron Tansy, M.D., the director of the stroke program at Mount Sinai Queens (MSQ). The physicians can also directly consult with their colleagues at The Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan providing a broader scope of expertise to help diagnose and treat patients.
Another telehealth program in partnership with a community healthcare center in upstate New York enables patients from rural areas to directly consult with Mount Sinai Health System pediatric epilepsy specialists. This technology is also extending to the ED, where a program has been launched to reduce readmissions and provide better patient outcomes by allowing healthcare professionals to communicate via telehealth with chronically ill patients in their homes before their symptoms cause them to seek care in the ED. The pilot telehealth projects are overseen by the Department of Information Technology at Mount Sinai.
“Technology has evolved to a point where it is less of a novelty in our doctors’ offices and more of an essential part of our physicians’ toolkits—and, indeed, an everyday part of our patients’ lives. The time has come for telehealth to move to the next level by putting it into wider practice, and we’re proud to have done that here at Mount Sinai, which is at the forefront of the telehealth revolution,” said Kumar Chatani, executive vice president and CIO for the Mount Sinai Health System.
