English Business (The Doctor Is In (Well, Logged In)

The Doctor Is In (Well, Logged In)

Surfing the Web in his all-white Dumbo loft, Dr. Jay Parkinson, 37, looks like any other young tech visionary. He has a trim beard and thick-framed glasses. He wears slim-fitting black outfits and jaunty scarves. He speaks with a measured, “This American Life”-like cadence. And he’s a firm believer in the utopian promise of the Internet.

But Dr. Parkinson’s start-up isn’t a new app or social network. He is a founder of Sherpaa, a Web site that operates like a virtual doctor’s office, examining patients by e-mail and text message. “We’re using the Internet to reinvent health care,” Dr. Parkinson said proudly, seated next to a Ping-Pong table and a shaggy goldendoodle.

Have a mysterious rash? Send a photo of it to Sherpaa, reply to a few e-mails and proceed to the nearest Duane Reade to pick up your prescription. “We’re tech-savvy doctors,” he said, “for tech-savvy patients.”

In fact, Dr. Parkinson is perhaps the most prominent of the city’s 2.0 doctors, who are rethinking the health care model along 21st-century lines. “Seeing patients is stressful for me,” Dr. Parkinson said. Instead, he networked.

He held parties, cocktail mixers and backyard barbecues that attracted Web luminaries like David Karp, founder of Tumblr; Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook and current publisher of The New Republic; and Jakob Lodwick, a founder of Vimeo. “The Internet crowd really latched on to my practice,” Dr. Parkinson said. Started in 2012, Sherpaa now has eight employees, including two primary-care physicians, and counts 500 customers from 30 companies. Sherpaa’s network includes 100 specialists to whom it refers clients and it can save companies up to $4,000 a year for each employee. – red, The New York Times