AristaMD Expands eConsult Services System Wide at North County Health Services in San Diego

Expansion Based on Successful Pilot that Improved Timely Access to Specialty Care

AristaMD, a technology-enabled service company providing a suite of electronic specialist consultation and referral tools, and North County Health Services (NCHS), a private not-for-profit community health center that serves over 70,000 patients across 13 clinic locations annually in San Diego, today announced the expansion of AristaMD’s eConsult platform to all clinics system wide at NCHS.

The expansion follows a four-month pilot that significantly outperformed expectations. In 65 percent of cases where a specialist was engaged for an electronic consultation (eConsult) utilizing the AristaMD platform and specialist panel, the issue was successfully resolved in under four hours and replaced the need for an in-person visit.

The AristaMD eConsult Platform is designed to improve access to specialist care and reduce costs by facilitating rapid collaboration between primary care providers (PCPs, NPs, PAs) and specialists. AristaMD offers the only comprehensive referral platform in the market that includes proven clinical work-up checklists being utilized by leading academic medical centers across the country, a HIPAA-compliant eConsult platform and robust data analytics.

“Not only are we empowering our providers with the support they need to make referral decisions, we are also improving high-quality and timely specialty care access for our patients who may not otherwise have gotten the care they needed,” said Dr. Denise Gomez, Clinical Director of Adult Medicine at NCHS. “As the pilot program was met with positive outcomes and very high acceptability by both providers and patients alike, we are thrilled to expand access to the eConsult service to all of our locations throughout North County.”

During the four-month pilot, NCHS providers at three locations consulted electronically with AristaMD’s adult and pediatric care specialists, enabling a significant amount of specialty care to be provided in the primary care setting and eliminating the need for many in-person specialist visits. Results of the pilot include:

65 percent of the pilot program’s eConsults resolved the patient’s issue altogether so that an in-person specialist visit was not necessary
Top three specialties were dermatology, orthopedic surgery and cardiology
91 percent of providers acknowledged that the program had a significant influence on their patients’ care plan
Nine out of 10 providers would recommend the service to others

“We deliver results to providers and their patients in a few hours, replacing the need to wait weeks and months to see a specialist,” said Rebecca Cofinas, President and CEO of AristaMD. “In this pilot, nearly two-thirds of patients got the answers they needed within four hours without the need for an in-person visit with a specialist. We see these results across the board in all of our clients from rural systems to urban centers, and we are extremely pleased to have NCHS expand to all of its locations.”