New York-Presbyterian Hospitals’ NYP OnDemand telehealth app recently added virtual urgent care visits & virtual clinic visits, powered in the background by American Well.
NYP OnDemand launched this past summer with a suite of offerings built into the platform including virtual second-opinions for patients across the country, inter-hospital consultation services, and more. Through a partnership with American Well, they’ve now added virtual urgent care visits & virtual physician visits.
The virtual urgent care visits are available to patients in New York state for $99, which may be covered by some insurance plans. The virtual physician visits are available for patients who are already seen in the NYP system and lets them see their own doctors without making the trek to the clinic.
Virtual doctor visits on a smartphone or other mobile devices isn’t new by any means. American Well, Teladoc, Doctors on Demand, and others have been offering virtual doc-in-a-box services for years. While convenient, there is a lack of continuity of care with these services that can be frustrating for patients & clinicians alike.
In this partnership, the virtual visits – even the urgent care visits – are built in to the NYP OnDemand app meaning that a patient can stay within their provider system for these visits. In fact, patients will see an NYP emergency physician in these visits. That can allow some continuity so that the encounter record is part of the chart & longitudinal providers can follow up as needed.
It does take a lot of coordination and commitment to offer this kind of service. Given the growing demand from patients for these kinds of services, though, it’ll be interesting to see which health systems follow suit (and how quickly they do it).
Source: Press Release, NYP OnDemand
