David Muller, MD, left, and Jeremy Boal, MD
The Mount Sinai Visiting Doctors Program, the largest academic home-visit program in the nation, celebrated its twentieth anniversary on Thursday, October 22, with a festive event held in the Annenberg West Lobby of The Mount Sinai Hospital.
Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer issued an official proclamation announcing October 22 as “Visiting Doctors Appreciation Day,” while commending the program’s interdisciplinary teamwork and dedication to patients and their families.
Since its inception in 1995, when three Mount Sinai residents—Laurent Adler, MD, MS; Jeremy Boal, MD; and David Muller, MD—created the Visiting Doctors Program to provide health care services to homebound patients in communities surrounding The Mount Sinai Hospital, the program has grown to care for more than 1,500 patients a year. The nationally recognized program now serves as a model for providing high-quality, patient-centered primary care to homebound patients.
Today, Dr. Muller is System Chair and Dean for Medical Education at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Dr. Boal serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, and Dr. Adler is National Medical Director for OptumHealth at UnitedHealth Group.
The Visiting Doctors Program is a joint venture between two Mount Sinai departments, the Samuel Bronfman Department of Medicine and the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine. When St. Vincent’s Hospital closed its doors in 2010, the Chelsea-Village House Call Program joined Mount Sinai Visiting Doctors and now provides care to homebound patients in downtown Manhattan. The St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital House Call Program joined in 2014 after the former Continuum Health Partners combined with The Mount Sinai Medical Center.
At the event, Linda DeCherrie, MD, Director of the Mount Sinai Visiting Doctors and Mount Sinai Chelsea-Village House Call Programs, noted that the program recently received the Innovators Award from the American Academy of House Call Medicine for submitting more academic papers on home-based primary and palliative care than any other program in the country. The award honors the core mission of the Visiting Doctors Program, which is to train health care workers in the art and science of making house calls.
In addition, Drs. Muller and Boal presented a posthumous Pioneer Award to the son and daughter of Philip Brickner, MD, founding Chair of the Department of Community Medicine at St. Vincent’s Hospital and founder of the Chelsea-Village House Call Program at Saint Vincent’s in 1973 (now the Mount Sinai Chelsea-Village House Call Program). The physicians noted Dr. Brickner’s dedication to providing home-based primary care to the frail and elderly in Chelsea, Greenwich Village, and Chinatown, and making thousands of home visits over the decades.
As the event’s concluding speaker, Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and President for Academic Affairs, the Mount Sinai Health System, reminded the audience that new advances in medical technologies are vitally important to patient care but can never replace the care provided by a visiting doctor. “Technology is coming, but the touch will always be there,” Dr. Charney said.