Tuesday, December 04, 2018
Aligned Telehealth today announced a new partnership to extend its reach through American Well’s industry-defining telehealth offering by adding on-demand emergency/consult psychiatry, on-site psychiatric staffing and integrated behavioral health capabilities to American Well’s platform.
As American Well seeks to increase the adoption of its platform by acute care operators, hospitals, and health systems, this partnership with a psychiatric group with over 20 years of psychiatric hospitalist acute and emergency consultation experience was a natural fit. Aligned’s background as a psychiatric hospitalist group with a singular focus on behavioral health will allow it to add specialized telehealth capabilities beyond telepsychiatry, including on-demand consultation, ambulatory care integration and even correctional health services.
Aligned Telehealth is on pace to become the nation’s largest provider of on-demand telepsychiatry consults in emergency rooms and acute hospital medical floors, re-defining on-demand as a primary focus in addition to its traditional telepsychiatry, on-site services and customized technology/provider behavioral health solutions.
Demand for psychiatric and behavioral health services is at an all-time high, while the overall number and availability of providers continues to decrease at alarming rates. Addressing this trend, Aligned developed a proprietary platform, set of best practices and dedicated on-demand work flows leveraging a smaller number of total providers to deliver care to a greater number of locations and patients in a unique telehealth model.
Aligned’s focus on on-demand healthcare allows health systems to address high-risk patients in emergency departments brought in by suicide risk, chronic mental illness and substance abuse. This is particularly critical for those who may not have insurance or be under-insured and experience extremely limited access to ambulatory behavioral health support or unmanageable wait times to see a psychiatric prescriber.
Dr. Nitin Nanda, the founder and CEO of Aligned Telehealth, stated, “We are very pleased to be working with American Well. Their platform will allow our doctors to function more efficiently, provide more care and improve patient outcomes. Many patients in behavioral health emergencies, especially those afflicted by the current opiate epidemic can receive care rapidly via telepsychiatry. Our partnership will not only provide truly comprehensive crisis intervention but will allow patients to receive the best care possible while reducing the costs.”
