How Virtual Care Enables Modernization of Healthcare Service Delivery 

Author: Mike Brandofino, President and COO, Caregility

We are at a watershed moment in modern medicine that is fundamentally changing healthcare delivery. The line between bedside care and virtual care has evaporated to the point where it is just healthcare. 

What may appear to be a sudden shift towards acceptance of hybrid care models because of the pandemic has been years in the making and can be traced to the early days of tele-ICU pioneered by Philips Healthcare and health systems like Mercy Virtual, which built the nation’s first virtual care hub with six floors of clinical specialists in a building with no patients. Their sole focus was to provide remote care to ICU patients around the country.  

What’s transformational about where we are now is the rapid expansion of virtual care beyond specialty units like tele-ICU and tele-stroke to dozens of additional clinical workflows that enable clinical innovation across the entire care continuum, including hospital-at-home initiatives.  

A McKinsey and Company report from this past June, “Digital transformation: Health systems’ investment priorities,” describes this shift to a hybrid care delivery model that blends virtual and in-person engagement. Virtual care was cited as the leading investment priority and the second biggest area of potential impact by healthcare executives.  

Telehealth and telemedicine have a long legacy as a safety net for hospitals, supporting care delivery during the pandemic and in ICUs before that. It continues to enable synchronous and asynchronous outpatient and behavioral health visits. We’re now seeing virtual care being threaded into processes throughout acute care, creating a secondary layer of remote clinical defense that enhances clinical collaboration to modernize inpatient care. 

Telehealth Enters the Hybrid Care Era 

Kourtney Matlock, president of Arkansas-based Baptist Health Rehabilitation Institute, sums up the current inflection point in care model innovation nicely, saying “Embracing virtual support as part of our acute care bedside support and quality strategy signifies a pivotal step forward in how we envision the future of healthcare.” 

After a tumultuous five years for healthcare organizations, hybrid care models are bringing welcome change. Virtual nursing programs are helping hospitals offset burnout, turnover, and reliance on travel nurses, bringing workforce costs down. 

Additionally, virtual sitter programs are helping health systems cost-effectively amplify the reach of patient safety teams. Most importantly, the addition of remote care support in acute hospital settings is helping healthcare organizations better coordinate care, intervene earlier, and improve patient safety and outcomes. 

Collaborative Care Teams  

Virtual engagement at the hospital bedside is elevating patient and staff satisfaction. In hybrid care models like virtual nursing, bedside and remote caregivers work in tandem to support patient care. That approach enables care teams to redistribute tasks like admissions, discharges, patient education, and more to remote nurses, which poses several interesting benefits.  

Patients are building stronger bonds with their care team because of the uninterrupted nature of video-based engagement. One leading Florida-based health system saw a 20 percent improvement in patient HCAHPS scores, thanks to better communication in its virtual nursing pilot program. Enhanced communication and patient education – including the ability to bring family caregivers and interpreters into care planning virtually – supports better patient outcomes.  

Collaborative hybrid care models give bedside teams valuable time back through task redistribution. With the average age and experience of bedside nurses dropping, programs like virtual nursing also help expand the reach of experienced nurse resources to support remote coaching and mentoring of less-experienced bedside clinicians. This trend is extending the careers of seasoned nurses and is a model that could help health systems weather future patient surges without having to resort to the expense of traveling nurse models, as they did during the pandemic.  

Care teams are finding that an “every bed” approach to remote care enablement not only drives patient and staff satisfaction but also creates an infrastructure that health systems can use as a springboard for field testing new solutions that augment the information available to clinical teams.  

Telehealth edge devices make it easy for healthcare organizations to tap into audio and video feeds in the patient room to enhance the clinical insight available to staff. Providers can layer in solutions like augmented observation to help monitor for patient safety threats, contactless monitoring to trend patient vital signs, and ambient listening to support clinical documentation.  

The integration of these solutions into Intelligent Hospital Room initiatives amplifies the information available to caregivers, stretching what they can do. In these use cases, virtual care platforms and integrated sensors become additional members of the care team, continuously capturing and analyzing actionable data that caregivers can use to save time, intervene more quickly, and improve patient outcomes.  

An Integrated Ecosystem 

Artificial intelligence solutions represent just one of many enabling tools in emerging hybrid care models. Pioneering health systems are integrating enterprise telehealth solutions with additional enabling technologies to further future-proof care models in their Hospital Room of the Future strategy.  

Peripheral tools that amplify clinical insight. The integration of remote monitoring solutions, clinical decision support tools, and third-party connected devices like digital stethoscopes are helping care teams remotely capture additional insights that drive clinical action. 

Smart room design that meets evolving patient expectations. Integration with in-room resources like interactive patient consoles enables health systems to use existing resources to support remote engagement at every bedside. This keeps implementation costs and complexity down while modernizing care rooms to meet evolving expectations.  

Service integration that ensures equitable care. Integration with remote, third-party clinical services helps ensure patient access to specialists, regardless of where they’re located, which is essential in rural areas where clinical resources are limited. Integrated interpreter services help health systems further address social determinant of health barriers and meet language access requirements, using two-way video to support communication for the deaf and patients with limited English proficiency. 

These are just a few of the ways healthcare organizations are improving care quality for patients and saving time for clinical teams by integrating remote care at the bedside. The industry is pivoting from an “either/or” approach to telehealth to a more holistic era of hybrid care innovation that integrates in-person and virtual engagement throughout the patient journey.  

By blending remote support into patient care delivery, hospitals are creating a new care standard that delivers a consistent, technology-enabled experience across the entire ecosystem – from the ambulatory setting through inpatient admissions to the home. 

This article was originally published in Health Data Management.