Health Makers: This Doctor Blends Holistic Health With Concierge Medicine and Telehealth
Parsley Health meets patients' needs for online healthcare during COVID-19.
Name Robin Berzin
Age 38
Title and company Founder and CEO of Parsley Health
Robin Berzin, MD, was doing her residency in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City when she realized that something was very wrong with the medical system.
“People coming into primary care outpatient services got a 15-minute visit — max — and a revolving door of prescription drugs and referrals to specialists,” says Dr. Berzin, the founder and CEO of Parsley Health and a graduate of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.
“But people weren’t getting better. I remember handing patients three or four prescriptions and feeling that this was not the solution. We had replaced being well with being medicated,” Berzin says.
Primary Care ‘the Way It Should Be’
She decided to try to fix it. In 2016, after being in private practice in Manhattan and a consultant in the health tech industry, she started Parsley Health, a concierge health, telemedicine, and digital health company.
“We’re focused on primary care the way it should be,” says Berzin. “We have a population that is chronically ill. We’re living on sugar, [have] a sedentary lifestyle, and [are under] stress. We’re set up for illness. It’s worse with age, but these diseases start in our twenties and thirties, and they don’t get addressed.”
The coronavirus pandemic is only highlighting this, especially as more young people are getting sick. “Heart disease, cancer, immune dysfunction, preexisting lung diseases — they all make you at greater risk for COVID-19,” she says.
Parsley Health offers almost everything a patient might want under one roof: “Your mental health, your diet, your movement, how you’re managing stress,” Berzin says. “Are you crushing Ambien and drinking wine? Or are you gardening and doing yoga? These drive your outcomes. So we’re curative; we’re not preventive.”
Quick Pivot to COVID-19 Screening, Testing, and Management
Since its inception, Parsley Health has offered members the option to talk to their doctors and health coaches online. So after broad social distancing measures went into effect in the United States because of COVID-19, they were able to move to 100 percent online visits pretty seamlessly. They also offer free online screenings and 15-minute online doctor visits for members who are worried they have contracted the virus.
"When we support members that are low risk with mild symptoms, we coach them through the steps of recovering at home and monitor [them] virtually,” she says. "This keeps them safe and reduces the risk of spreading the virus.
"For members that are at high risk of developing a severe case of COVID-19,” she continues, "we act as their quarterback. Across the country, we help them get swab testing at local facilities, or in California, our doctors can send a licensed phlebotomist to the member’s home to draw blood for a comprehensive COVID-19 antibody screening. The new antibody test looks at IgG, IgM, and IgA antibodies to confirm if they have COVID-19 or are recently recovered from it. We’re hoping to expand access to this testing option nationally as soon as possible.”
The Parsley Health team has also been answering COVID-19 questions on the company's blog.
Doctor Visits, Health Coaching, and Unlimited Messaging
For an annual membership of $150 per month, paid in 12 monthly installments or in one lump sum, patients receive five in-person or online visits with their doctor, totaling four hours; five visits with a health coach; and unlimited online messaging.
“We’ll help you, refer you to specialists. We’ll also manage chronic illnesses and create a personalized plan that addresses mental health, sleep, nutrition, fitness, supplements, and more in-depth things like the microbiome and inflammation,” she says.
“We are helping women get pregnant without IVF. We’re helping reduce high blood pressure, high cholesterol,” she explains. (Any extra tests are paid out of pocket or billed through insurance, but the company works with your insurance company to get the most cost-effective testing possible.)
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Parsley Health offered telemedicine in 25 states. With so many people staying home for all or most of the day, virtual meetings, conferences, and doctor’s visits have become the norm. Now, says Berzin, Parsley Health is in 31 states and counting.
‘Telemedicine Is a Feature, Not a Product’
“My view has always been that telemedicine is a feature, not a product. It’s part of the way the world communicates outside of medicine,” she says. “Telemedicine is having a seminal moment, and by force, we are as a society en masse understanding how it works.”
In the past, people were skeptical of telemedicine. They didn’t understand how it was possible to receive a proper examination on a computer screen or mobile phone.
“This is understandable because the idea of medical care is that you get this annual checkup,” Berzin says. “But that’s a very dated view of medicine. The physical exam itself has not been terribly valuable in a well person. Does 1 out of every 1.000 or 2,000 well checkups find something? Yeah, probably. But it’s very rare. Our medical system needs to adapt to offering medical services this way. We can’t insist patients come to us.”