Dr. Mark Merlin, MD

Dr. Mark Merlin is trained in both emergency medicine and internal medicine, and has practised across adult and paediatric emergency departments, as a hospitalist, in intensive care and in urgent care.

He is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. He served as Vice Chairman of Emergency Medicine at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center for six years, and founded and directed its EMS fellowship, which grew to become the largest in the country.

He has organised and led two medical missions, to Haiti and to Puerto Rico, taking more than thirty multi-specialty physicians and roughly a million dollars of donated medical equipment to provide free care to adults and children displaced by natural disaster and poverty.

As Chief Medical Officer he sets the clinical standards this practice is held to: how visits are conducted, how urgent problems are triaged, and how the team decides when something needs a hospital rather than a house call.

How Mark works with patients

Every clinician at Life Primary Care works the same way, because the model is the point. Visits happen at the patient's home, a first visit runs 45 to 60 minutes, and that time goes into a proper examination, a review of every medication in the house, a look at how the home actually works for the person living in it, and a written plan the family can follow.

There is no clinic to travel to and no waiting room. We visit private homes, apartments, a family member's house, and independent and assisted living residences across Somerset, Morris, Union, Essex, Passaic, Bergen counties.

What the clinical team handle at home

Routine primary care and annual physicals, long term conditions such as diabetes, heart failure, COPD and kidney disease, Medicare Annual Wellness Visits, care in the days after a hospital discharge, dementia and geriatric care, palliative care, and same-day problems for established patients. Blood draws and EKGs happen at your table.

Booking a visit

Call 973-607-4911 and our coordinator will confirm your address, your insurance and the reason for the visit. We cannot promise a specific clinician for a specific appointment, since the team covers six counties between them, but your chart travels with whoever comes and every visit is written up for the rest of the team.