Virtual Health Playbook: Evaluate and Expand a Virtual Health Practice
Go virtual to increase revenue, expand care options, and improve patient satisfaction.
- Virtual health adoption significantly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, post-pandemic virtual health has seen lower than expected adoption rates in healthcare organizations.
- Due to positive experiences with virtual health services, patient demand has increased and most patients expect virtual health services to be the norm and standard of care for current and future healthcare delivery.
- With the growing overall digital health market, healthcare services are becoming more digitally integrated.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
As care is shifted to nontraditional or lower-cost settings such as hospital at home (HaH), health systems will need to think about the value that drives these strategies, scale virtual care options as they become proven and viable, and improve patient access to virtual care overall by making it simple, accessible, and affordable.
Impact and Result
Info-Tech recommends optimizing your virtual health care practice now:
- Create and improve existing workflows to enhance patient experiences.
- Establish a virtual care team that has the right training and resources.
- Integrate quality improvement approaches.
- Select the right technology that will work for your clinical teams and patient population.
Virtual Health Playbook
Evaluate and expand a virtual health practice.
EXECUTIVE BRIEF
Analyst Perspective
Healthcare organizations prioritizing virtual health strategies and options that go beyond the traditional virtual care visits will achieve operational cost efficiencies and improve patient experience, clinical outcomes, and clinician engagement.
Advances in virtual health have been anticipated for over a decade, with the COVID-19 pandemic being a catalyst for growth. However, post-pandemic healthcare organizations continue to face virtual health optimization challenges due to low maturity data integration, unavailable infrastructures (especially in rural health), data privacy/security concerns, interoperability, and regulatory payment barriers. On the other hand, the patient demand for virtual health service delivery has greatly increased, with the expectation for this to be the norm going forward.
In a growing digital health market, opportunities exist for health systems to implement, advance, and expand their virtual care services in a way that creates new models of care that will decrease costs and improve patient satisfaction. Healthcare leaders have already made strategic investments in anticipating an expansion of virtual care as a viable service delivery alternative to intensive in-person appointments. They have also started investing in artificial intelligence to optimize virtual care.
Enabling and expanding virtual care within your healthcare organization will open care to patients across vast geographies. In addition to more options for access to care, virtual care will be a more convenient option for patients and how they interact with all aspects of their healthcare service delivery, which will lead to greater satisfaction for patients and caregivers alike.
Sharon Auma-Ebanyat
Research Director, Healthcare
Industry Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
Your Challenge
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Common Obstacles
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Info-Tech’s ApproachInfo-Tech’s recommended approach is to optimize your virtual healthcare practice.
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Info-Tech Insight: As care is shifted to nontraditional or lower-cost settings such as hospital at home (HaH), health systems will need to think about the value that drives these strategies, scale virtual care options as they become proven and viable, and improve patient access to virtual care overall by making it simple, accessible, and affordable.
What is virtual health in the context of digital health?
Is virtual health the same as telehealth?
Virtual health is an umbrella term that refers to the use of any technology to support healthcare providers in providing care to patients or to collaborate with peers. Virtual health is a tactic to facilitate convenient care for patients and achieve organizational strategic priorities within healthcare organizations.
Virtual health includes:
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Telehealth
- Synchronous (telemedicine)
- Asynchronous (store and forward patient information)
- Remote patient monitoring
- Care coordination: provider-to-provider
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Care Navigation
- Patient portals
- E-triage
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Autonomous Health Powered by AI
- Synchronous (e.g. chatbots, robotic machines, remote sensors, smart pills)
- Asynchronous (e.g. health and fitness trackers and monitoring applications)
Telehealth is one of the components of virtual health and is the delivery of healthcare services using telecommunication technology. It enables providers to connect with patients and with each other via telephone or videoconferencing, mobile health apps, electronic patient health information transmission, and remote patient monitoring.
Virtual health is a part of digital health
Sources: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2018; DHI Scotland, 2023
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Unlock Sample ResearchContributors
- Anonymous Executive Director, Telehealth Services United States Hospital
- Anonymous Vice President, Virtual Health for Health System in the United States
- Anonymous Assistant Vice President, Hospital System United States Hospital
- Anonymous Registered Nurse, Clinical Program Manager, Health System in the United States