Sherpaa is a New-York based medical company that is stepping in a new direction. The idea of this company is to keep patients out of the doctor’s office as much as possible. Instead, patients are able to connect with primary care doctors online or on the phone around the clock. Co-founder Jay Parkinson says that the goal of Sherpaa is to keep overhead health care costs down for companies while improving doctor-patient relationships.

“There are many reasons people avoid the emergency room—the endless waiting, the stench, the feeling of being lost in a sea of aches and pains. But what if you could skip the visit to the emergency room and your doctor altogether—at least in the flesh?”

So how does it work? If a client gets a bad cut, he or she can take a picture of an injury and e-mail it to the doctor. The doctor will then reply telling the person if an ER visit is required and if not will give instructions on self-care. If the injury is bad enough that it needs other medical attention, the doctor may call up a surgeon (or proper physician) and set up an appointment for the patient. In this way, a visit to the emergency room is avoided.

How does this system help bring down health care costs? Sherpaa cuts out wasteful spending by analyzing individual companies’ health care and securing them with how their employees use medical services.

They generally recommend a deductible of at least $2,000, and then ask companies to give employees a $2,000 debit card for health care. Whatever they don’t use goes back into the company coffers. In the end, these companies can save $2,000 to $4,000 per employee, even with the debit card.”

The company is just starting out with only a few on-call doctors but plans to expand in the near future. Could this be the way of the future? Will the new patient-doctor relationship be that of e-mails and phone calls? Sherpaa is the first company of it’s kind, but it may be leading the way to a health care revolution.

 

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