A New York-based healthcare provider is using a recently launched podcast to promote primary care to the local community.
By Jenna Hughes
Many patients across the U.S healthcare system struggle with the affordability and accessibility of receiving care. It can often be difficult for patients to understand the complexity of health systems, and many patients often struggle to understand the services covered by their insurance, or what care they can receive without insurance.
Health systems, as a result, have begun to communicate with patients more directly, through content creation, social media, podcasts, and more, with the goal of allowing patients to get a glimpse of available health services. One such example, NYC Health + Hospitals, the nation’s largest safety net health system, aims to bridge aspects of the health system knowledge gap in its local community with the launch of its new health-related podcast titled “The Remedy.”
The Remedy podcast features renowned leaders and healthcare providers as special guests to discuss health topics ranging from community health and wellness, nutrition, women’s health, and more.
The focus of the NYC Health + Hospitals system is on delivering care to communities regardless of their ability to pay, their immigration status, or challenges they may face to receiving care. The hospital’s mission as a safety net healthcare organization is to provide New Yorkers with the primary care and specialty services they need, emphasizing that they administer care to everyone, regardless of where in life they are coming from.
The health system also offers nuanced health program models to its patients, ranging from lifestyle medicine to telehealth reproductive care. Other topics relevant to the health of New Yorkers are addressed in the podcast, such as COVID-19 and preparing for the next pandemic, the homelessness crisis, and the migrant crisis.
The podcast
The Remedy podcast features host Dr. Michael Shen, Clinical Director of the Primary Care Safety Net Clinic at NYC Health + Hospitals/Woodhull. Dr. Shen plans and outlines the storylines and conducts the interviews featured in the podcast. Podcast guests are employees of the health system, who share their unique perspectives on the care that they provide to patients. The podcast aims to connect patients, staff, and other healthcare providers.
The podcast was started to “help New Yorkers get a sense of the huge hospital system that serves them,” said Dr. Shen. “A podcast is a good way of letting people hear the voices of public hospital leaders while helping New Yorkers understand how we can serve them.”
As media-based marketing has increased within the healthcare industry, health systems too have entered with their own content.
“It’s a big deal that a public health system is entering into the media world, it makes health systems more personable. Media forms such as podcasts are an important thing for medical field professionals to make healthcare more accessible for people,” said Dr. Shen.
Holistic care
New York City feels like a place with hundreds of specialists and doctors to choose from. It can be a confusing and arduous for patients seeking medical care to know how to start and what care model works best for them in their current situation.
“As a public hospital system, we want people to focus on that they can approach healthcare from a holistic perspective instead of a fragmented perspective with specialty care nationally,” said Dr. Shen. “It is a question of how we navigate the fragmented healthcare system in a holistic and person-centered way.”
The podcast is set to include seven episodes, with a new episode released every two weeks.
The first episode, titled “The Power of Primary Care,” features host Dr. Michael Shen interviewing Dr. Mitchell Katz, the President and Chief Executive Officer of NYC Health + Hospitals and a primary care physician at NYC Health + Hospitals/Gouverneur; Dr. Andrew Wallach, Ambulatory Care Chief Medical Officer of NYC Health + Hospitals and Chief of Ambulatory Care at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue; and Dr. Michelle Soto, Chief of Ambulatory Care at NYC Health + Hospitals/South Brooklyn Health.
In the podcast, Dr. Katz touches on patients seeing a specialist when they could instead visit a primary care provider. Each doctor emphasizes that primary care is a fundamental form of care, and that the role of the primary care doctor is coordination and continuation of care. Primary care providers can be thought of as the “glue” that holds a patient’s healthcare experience together.
“The first season of the podcast highlights the big picture programs that our health system feels are innovative and unique to NYC Health + Hospitals,” said Dr. Shen. “The first episodes feature primary care, innovative food and lifestyle medicine topics, and will go on to discuss factors that affect the health of New Yorkers. By giving a glimpse of what’s available from these programs, patients can benefit.”
A barrier to primary care is lack of insurance, but NYC Health + Hospitals has a program for those that don’t qualify for health insurance. NYC Care allows underinsured, or uninsured, patients to get access to top quality care within the system. Patients can enroll and have access to primary and specialty care for free or at a reduced cost, and all New Yorkers can participate despite their situation. It is important to be able to treat all the communities across New York for public health.
The second episode of the podcast, “Food is Medicine,” emphasizes plant-based eating as medicine, considering how hospitals can help patients eat healthier and lower high blood pressure and bring type 2 diabetes into remission. The third episode, is titled “Ready for the Next Pandemic,” and covers how health systems navigate and respond to health crises.
“We hope to get the podcast renewed for a second season. Another focus of the podcast is to help connect hospital staff and provide them with information about what’s happening across the system,” said Dr. Shen. “We plan in upcoming seasons to feature what we as a health system are doing on the ground locally, so that other parts of the system share knowledge between different facilities, and it goes on to benefit New Yorkers.”