Help in the Home

On an average day, Dr. Theresa Soriano finds herself in unfamiliar homes. As director of the Mount Sinai visiting doctors program, Soriano, 35, devotes her days to home-based primary and palliative care across Manhattan. The program, which is the largest academic initiative of its kind in North America, educates aspiring doctors about a fading practice. â??This type of medicine isn"t very common anymore, even though it used to be how medicine was practiced all the time, Soriano said. â??With the population aging as it is and people having more and more chronic illnesses, we really have seen that this type of medicine is really important. Many of her patients are people who decide they want to spend their last days at home, rather than in a hospital bed. â??It"s not second-class medicine just because you"re not in a hospital, she said, adding the program is as much about comfort as it is about cures. â??You can give great care out of your backpack if you bring the right tools with you. Soriano"s job is twofold: While she started as a full-time clinician, she now spends half her time doing administrative work. More recently, she"s been devoting time to her three-month-old son, Simon, in her home on the Upper West Side. Born in Chicago and raised in New York, she attended the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Having gone into school with an interest in community service, she was intrigued by the visiting doctors program, which began in 1995. In 2004, after a residency in internal medicine at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Florida, Soriano landed a job at Mount Sinai. The position joined her wish to be in an academic setting with her love of community-based work's a passion she had as early as high school, when she volunteered at soup kitchens and hospitals. She credits her parents, who came to the U.S. from the Philippines, for teaching her the importance of giving back. But a lot of her enthusiasm also comes from her desire to understand other people. â??I originally wanted to be a journalist and present stories about people that were sort of in the background, she said. As a psychology major in college, though, she began to learn about health issues and landed an internship doing home visits with the Department of Health. â??I met a lot of families who were living in not the best conditions, said Soriano, whose interest in public health was piqued by the experience. Today, she is a member of the American Academy of Home Care Physicians, which awarded her its 2009 Housecall Doctor of the Year Award. She and her team make visits throughout Manhattan. But most of their work is concentrated in the area north of 59th Street, and Soriano spends a lot of time in central and east Harlem. â??When you become homebound it really crosses all lines, she said. â??You don"t only have poor patients or only wealthy patients.