Narcisse asks which specialties face greatest demand; Long on neurology wait times

Which specialties currently experience the greatest demand among NYC care members, and are there service areas where access challenges remain?

So the top five areas when you go beyond primary care are OBGYN, eye care, dental, cardiology, and podiatry.

And are there service areas where access challenges, they remain throughout?

It's a good question.

The reality is access challenges with different specialties change day to day.

So if we lose a team of rheumatologists or neurologists, that will cause, they'll make it harder to access services in those specialties.

So, for example, right now, we have longer wait times for neurology.

Because we lost neurologists that were in our system.

So now we're seeking to build that back up, and then when we have, the wait times will go back down, and there may be another specialty in the future if some people should leave that would have longer wait times.

So it is a moving target.

I think it, to me, though, speaks to the importance of we're not just reliant on

putting your name on a wait list, which was the way things have been done in the past.

Today, if you have a need, we're going to have the neurologist look at your need, for example, through the e-consult.

Maybe you don't need to be seen.

I'll give you a good example of this.

We recently had a backlog in hematology.

Hematology is an interesting field in medicine, as you know, because they rarely ever need to see the patient.

It's all...

You don't see the patient.

So it can be answered via questions.

So what we did to unlock access there and really solve that problem was we put everything through eConsult, and lo and behold, what you'd expect to happen happened.

The vast majority of hematology needs were addressed with a response back.

So we have different ways of addressing needs as they change with respect to specialty access, but I want to see care patients have the same access that all of our other patients do, starting with e-consult to make sure that any of our patients with more need are seen more quickly.

Okay, so there is nothing you can tell me on which one is the longest in the way.

the specialty that you have that mostly like the top one now.

We can pull the top ones today.

I just want to give the caveat that it may be different in next week, next month.