2 million times, a specialist was just a screen away: virtual doctors reach a milestone

When someone arrives at a small hospital with signs of a stroke, minutes matter — and a neurologist may be hours away. A physician-owned telemedicine service, TeleSpecialists, has now passed 2 million patient encounters, connecting nearly 500 hospitals across 36 states with more than 200 brain and mental-health specialists, day and night. The second million took less than a third of the time the first one did, and the service now handles more than 1,200 patient encounters a day — a sign of how much care now travels by screen to the patient, instead of the patient travelling to the specialist.