New app puts a NJ doctor right in your pocket

📞 A NJ healthcare network has created an artificial-intelligence driven app

📞 The app connects patients with doctors almost immediately

📞 It's like having a dedicated family doctor on your smartphone

We’ve all been through it. You wake up worrying about a health issue and then try to get a doctor’s appointment, only to find out there are no openings for days.

Hackensack Meridian Health has created a new app called HMH 24/7 that will help solve this unpleasant experience.

What is the 24/7 app?

It’s an artificial intelligence (AI) driven app developed by HMH’s partner, K Health, said Dr. Daniel Varga, chief physician executive at Hackensack Meridian Health in Edison.

Consider it like having a dedicated family doctor on your smartphone, but with a high-tech twist.

“With this AI-driven app, a person can simply pick up their smartphone, go into the app, give their chief complaint, the AI in the app will come up with a few very simple questions for the individual, and then very quickly connect the doctor, who now already has all of that background information from the patient, and can immediately go into confirming certain data, adding new data, and then starting very quickly to get to a solution with the patient,” Varga said.

Many New Jersey residents don’t have a primary care physician, he said. So, for those folks, they can actually have a continuity relationship with an HMH 24/7 doctor. They can interact with the app when they need do, and get on with the same doctor, forming and building a virtual relationship with a doctor for their needs, whether it’s for episodic or for an ongoing ailment, Varga said.

The 24/7 app will also be useful in terms of being an access-to-care model when a doctor who has an office in New Jersey is booked to the nines and can’t get the patient in, Varga explained. If the medical group is at capacity, it can use 24/7 as an extension of their office.

The nice thing about a 24/7 appointment is that the doctors of 24/7 are documenting in the exact same electronic health record that the doctors in the HMH medical group and HMH hospitals are documenting in, Varga said.

So, for example, if Varga’s patient happens to see a 24/7 doctor and then sees the same patient again, he doesn’t have to run around finding the patient’s record of that appointment. It’s in the patient’s chart.

How long has the 24/7 app been around?

The app has been up and running for a couple of years, Varga said. The first big profile customers were Cedar Sinai in California, and Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

Most of the doctors who are affiliated with these hospitals, are doctors who are employed by them, called a closed medical staff, he said.

HMH is a very pluralistic physician model. It has independent, employed, and contracted doctors.

“We’re really excited with the adaptability that K Health brings as we build 24/7 because we believe it can be a service to every one of those cohorts of doctors. An independent physician, whose patients happen to come to an HMH hospital, get seen in the ED (emergency department), get discharged, but that doctor can’t get them in for a week, we can have that patient seen by a 24/7 doctor in between when they get sent home from the ED and when they get seen by their personal medical doctor a week or two later,” Varga said.

How is this different from a telehealth call?

The app and the proprietary AI that drives it, make the experience for the patient, seamless, Varga said.

In a telehealth call, people tend to get whoever happens to answer the call, so there may not be any record of continuity of care.

With 24/7, using one common electronic health record, everything that has happened to a patient in the past six months, let’s say, inside the HMH medical group, is there for the HMH 24/7 doctor to see. So, they are never seeing the patient out of context, Varga explained.

Plus, they can have the same doctor every time they have a 24/7 visit, unlike with a telehealth call, and that’s a game changer, Varga said.

With a virtual health company like K Health, if you were just a stand-alone, there’s no way to get the patient to the right place, right time, right care, and right professional, Varga said.

But having K Health and HMH partner together to create 24/7, means that when you see a 24/7 doctor, you’re integrated into an ecosystem of healthcare delivery.
They can get you to an HMH medical group doctor with a brick-and-mortar office, they can get you to one of their urgent cares or an emergency department.

“We think that’s a real changer relative to just somebody doing a virtual app, and saying, hi, you just had an episodic visit with our app, and the next time you connect, if we decide that you need to go a hospital, we can just say, well, go to your local hospital, as opposed to actually being able to schedule you right into HMH,” Varga said.

The HMH 24/7 app is for anyone in the state of New Jersey. Simply go to the HMH website, download the app, and become a patient immediately.

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