NYC Health + Hospitals, https://www.nychealthandhospitals,org, the largest public healthcare system in the U.S., provides inpatient, outpatient, and home-based services to more than one million New Yorkers every year in more than 70 locations across the city’s five boroughs.
One new project includes the launch of the H2O/Epic EMR system at the hospital system facility in Kings County, and at nine associated Gotham Health community-based health centers. For the first time, the health system is using a single unified EMR system across the system’s acute care hospitals, and ambulatory care clinics.
In another move, the NYC Health System has launched their first home-based primary care pilot. The pilot program will support a team of visiting doctors and nurse practitioners who will make house calls to home-limited patients served by NYC Health+ Hospitals in Kings County in Brooklyn.
Each at-home primary care patient will get house calls by a primary care physician along with follow-up visits by a nurse practitioner who will bring an at-home kit tailored to a patient’s previous diagnosis and care along with necessary medical devices and medications as needed.
Patients eligible for the home-based primary care services will include patients over 50 who are house bound, have at least one chronic condition, or find it too physically taxing to leave the home.
The pilot program will offer primary care services in the home and use telehealth video visits to connect patients to specialty care, mental health services, and help contact social workers. The home-based primary care pilot is expected to serve 200 patients.
The community primary care pilot is being funded in part by grants from the Altman Foundation, New York Community Trust, and the Fan Fox and Leslie R Samuels Foundation, Inc., along with investments from NYC Health+ Hospitals. The funding will total $900,000 over the next two years to cover the cost for new staff, transportation, equipment, and supplies.
NYC Health is also adopting a new teleretinal screening approach to change the way patients with diabetes are evaluated for retinopathy. Time can be a factor when identifying retinal changes since changes can do irreversible damage to someone’s vision.
The NYC Health System plans to install teleretinal screening machines in primary care clinics at all 11 acute care facilities, in select Gotham Health community based health centers, and provide screening for correctional health by the end of 2020.