The Future of Medicine

In 2010, Shirin Peters was disillusioned with medicine and not sure what her path forward should be. She found residency exhausting and frustrating and felt the bureaucracy of hospital medicine kept her from any real decision-making or change-making.

She decided to relocate for a year to North Carolina to work at her father’s multispecialty practice, seeing patients, supervising clinical trials, and learning more about the business of medicine. 

By fall of 2011 she was homesick for the city and was ready to return to New York. She had a vision for an innovative medical practice focusing on preventing illness and meeting all the needs she had herself as a busy New Yorker. She started by taking on hospitalist shifts to earn a living and rented clinic space part time from a solo practitioner, to start to build a patient base. A few months in, the physician she was renting from decided to sell her practice. It was a unique opportunity to jump in to caring for a practice full of patients, and with her family’s support Shirin was able to make this dream come true overnight. She named the practice Bethany Medical Clinic after her father’s practice in North Carolina. Historically, Bethany was a place where Mary, Martha, and Lazarus lived. It was a center for healing where many people with various ailments, from many different backgrounds came, seeking change or cure. It seemed to fit Shirin’s vision for the practice.

Bethany Medical Clinic grew organically by word of mouth as patients shared their experiences about a primary care office who went above and beyond to meet their needs. Bethany offered early morning appointments, evening appointments, and weekend appointments. It was a practice that tried hard to respect patients’ time by offering efficient but thorough care and this made it possible for patients to get in and out quickly and get back to work! Great care and attention was given to determining and ordering the most complete diagnostic and screening testing that would be fully covered by insurance, thereby minimizing the cost to our young and often financially constrained patients.

As Bethany’s patient volume grew so too did its scope of practice. Cutting edge tools to assess body composition and metabolic rate, for example, were incorporated into the practice to offer new data to patients about their own health. New services which were in demand from our existing patients were added in, such as dermatology, cosmetic dermatology, weight loss protocols, and then ultrasound imaging, and some specialty care such as gastroenterology.

An important consideration in Bethany’s practice approach is that the deeper the connection and understanding between the provider and patients, the better the health outcomes for the patient. Shirin lets this insight guide all practice decisions and Bethany is committed to allowing provider-patient relationships to thrive. This is evident in all aspects of care: from the offering of all preventative care in one place in a series of visits (each visit deepening our understanding of a patient’s health); to the in-depth health and medical history assessment we do when a new patient comes to the practice.

Shirin grew the practice over the next year to double revenue and patient volume, and found the practice had outgrown the space. In 2013 Bethany Medical Clinic relocated to murray hill into a clinic space with 9 exam rooms and ample room to grow. Shirin brought on several other physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants to care for the growing patient base.

After noticing that the vast majority of Bethany patients lived or worked in Murray Hill a few blocks from the practice, Shirin fixed on the idea of offering the same care to other Manhattan neighborhoods. She opened sites in Columbus Circle, then the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side and Chelsea.

In the past year Shirin wanted to bridge a gap she saw in primary care support. She saw many patients being referred to see a therapist or nutritionist but being unable to find any provider that took insurance in a reasonable commuting distance, or offered appointment times outside of regular work hours. Working with an expert billing team, Shirin found a way to solve this issue and now Bethany Medical Clinic has incorporated nutrition and psychotherapy services into the practice. We are able to offer these services to our patient at no-cost in mornings, evenings, and weekends, as they are fully billed to and covered by insurance. These services have made a huge impact for our patients and we believe this care gives Bethany patients the best possible health outcomes. Shirin finds it very rewarding to offer a complete array of primary care and preventative services to New Yorkers, because she can see the impact this care is having day today in preventing illness and optimizing health.

New Yorkers face unique challenges in their journey to ideal health. It’s Bethany Medical Clinic’s mission to help New Yorkers to overcome these obstacles by offering comprehensive but efficient preventative medical care and primary care. We know you have a lot going on and we care that you need to get back to work at a certain time. We understand that while New York City offers cultural experiences and mind-opening connections that no other city does, there are also stresses that lead to unhealthy fast eating, inadequate exercise, poor concentration, depression and anxiety for many New Yorkers. We know because we live here and face these same stresses! 

Comprehensive but Efficient Care:

As a solution to your problems we have put together a team of outstanding healthcare providers – including primary care providers, dermatologists, psychotherapists and nutritionists – who can leverage innovative technology and offer you cutting edge care in one convenient location, early in the morning before work, on your lunch-break, after work till 8pm, or even on weekends – we are open every saturday.

Complete but Affordable Care:

The other thing we know as New Yorkers is that health has to be within reach financially. New York ranks among the most expensive places to live in the world, and health insurance is not cheap for your employer or for you. We believe that when high quality healthcare is covered by your insurance it will be the most effective so have designed all our care plans to make the most of your insurance coverage and to be low cost or no-cost to you. 

Personalized Care

We have put a lot of thought into creating a fresh approach to healthcare and we purposefully decided to keep our clinics small and intimate in our quest to design what we believe is the ideal healthcare experience: the kind of healthcare that has the best shot at really helping you be the best version of yourself. By offering care in small clinic units serving different New York City neighborhoods, we keep our care personal. Our patients are not numbers and and we think its important to know ALL about you to give you the care you need instead of applying a bandaid with “urgent care”. We ask a lot of questions and we do all we can to build and support relationships between each patient and their provider.