Inmates can spend six to eight hours shackled in holding pens and sitting in traffic as they travel to NYC Health & Hospitals' Bellevue campus for five minutes with a doctor. “That was frustrating for the patient because they went through this tremendous effort to get there and they could only have this very, very limited time to get their concerns addressed,” Pham said.
Pham and his colleagues came up with a solution. Earlier this year, they introduced telemedicine to Rikers Island, which has some 55,000 inmates come through its doors annually.
