When I talk to healthcare providers about virtual care, I remind them that virtual care isn’t a strategy—it’s an enabler of strategy. That’s an important difference to make as organizations look at the virtual care solutions they put in place before or during the pandemic and decide what to do next.

It is easy to start with the technology and build processes around it. A better way to start is to ask service line, operational, and strategic leaders what problems you want to solve or what goals you want to reach. Are you making a way in? Trying to make digital health fair? Want to be the low-cost leader in a certain business? Once you know what you want to do, you can look for virtual care tools that will help you do it in as many ways as possible.

In the time after the pandemic, virtual care is still changing quickly, which gives providers a great chance to rethink and improve these important solutions and services.

Healthcare Providers Move from Point Solutions to Platforms

Telemedicine is only one part of virtual care, but many providers are focusing on it. The stopgap measures, ad hoc platforms, and tools that weren’t HIPAA-compliant worked for a while, and since then, providers have been standardizing the solutions and processes they adopted quickly in 2020.

One way to approach standardization is to think about point solutions versus platform solutions. Point solutions are good for a small number of use cases, while platform solutions can be used as the basis for many applications. In the past few years, many providers have bought both kinds of solutions for different business lines. Now, they have to decide which ones to keep, grow, or get rid of.

In general, providers are moving away from solutions that only do one thing and toward platforms that can do many things. Even if you’re only trying to solve one problem, you might be able to use a platform to solve other problems or make the solution the same across the organization.

But some point solutions, like tools that can diagnose a stroke from afar, are so useful or specific that an organization may decide to keep them anyway. The next question is how to connect these point solutions to the platform that supports the rest of your use cases.

The answer is to work together.

Integrate Virtual Care Tools for a Seamless Clinician Experience

Integration of different solutions into a larger ecosystem is one of the hardest parts of virtual care. For example, how many virtual care tools are separate from the rest of the clinician or patient experience? Do clinicians have to leave the electronic health records (EHRs) they may be using to use point solutions? Then, how does the data get into the EHR?

The best plan is to build a layer of integration on top of the EHR and virtual care solutions that lets clinicians work on a platform that is consistent and fits their roles. This layer lives in the cloud, pulls data and solutions from multiple sources, and gives users a smooth experience.

Integration is important because EHRs are such a big part of how clinicians do their jobs. As virtual care applications grow, this will become even more important. Providers need to improve their efficiency and make sure that technology stays out of the way so that they and their patients can focus on care.

Use Clinical Automation to Streamline Virtual Care Workflows

Processes and workflows that happen online shouldn’t just copy what happens in person. When making virtual care services, it can be tempting to use the same methods we already know. But virtual care will work better if providers take the time to change the way they do things for virtual situations.

When a patient checks in in person, for example, providers usually ask them to show an ID. Putting this into a virtual workflow doesn’t always make sense, and making patients upload images is a hassle. Another option would be to use artificial intelligence (AI) to look at a picture of the ID on file and decide if the patient needs to provide more proof.

In general, virtual care has a lot to gain from clinical automation. For example, AI can help doctors keep an eye on patients by using computer vision to tell when a patient is likely to fall or get out of bed and then alerting the doctors. With remote patient monitoring, data from a diabetes pump can go straight into an EHR and automatically update a care plan.

The idea is that you can add by taking away. How can using technology to handle administrative tasks for doctors and patients add value? That’s a great way to be successful when moving to the next level of virtual care.

Elliott Wilson wrote this story. He has worked his whole life in non-profit healthcare provider systems. He has a lot of experience coming up with and implementing digital strategies that work well with clinical operational realities on the ground.

It’s not a secret that having access to healthcare is important for living a healthy life, but people who live far away from healthcare facilities may not have as much access. Access to healthcare is important for preventing disease, finding it early, diagnosing it, and treating it, as well as for improving the quality of life. How can rural residents make sure they can get the care they need?

Barriers to healthcare in rural areas can be caused by a number of things, making it hard for people to get the care they need. The lack of physical healthcare facilities, the strain on healthcare systems’ finances, and the lack of staff are the main reasons for this. All of these problems can make health care more expensive and harder to get.

Virtual care is one way to deal with these problems. Virtual care is the ability to connect patients to doctors and nurses so that care can be given when and where it is needed. Virtual care can help rural people deal with these problems by giving them quick and easy ways to get health care no matter where they are. Here are three ways that virtual care can help health care providers in rural areas deal with problems they often face.

Direct, virtual access to healthcare services for residents

Telehealth is when medical care is given using digital tools. By getting rid of geographical barriers, healthcare can be accessed anywhere and at any time. This makes it easier than ever for people in rural areas to get the care they need. This can be very helpful in places where people live a long way from the nearest hospital or clinic. Telehealth solutions make it easier for providers and patients to work together even though they live in different places. Different kinds of telemedicine, like synchronous telemedicine, asynchronous telemedicine, and remote patient monitoring, can show these solutions.

Synchronous telemedicine is when health information is sent at the same time it is needed. A live video call with a provider is an example of synchronous telemedicine.

Asynchronous telemedicine is when doctors and patients talk to each other but not at the same time. This conversation usually helps give more information. With this “store-and-forward” method, patients can send information to providers that they can look at later. With asynchronous telemedicine, a patient can send an electronic picture or message to their provider, who can then use that information to help them diagnose and treat the patient.

Remote patient monitoring lets providers check on patients’ health from a distance and stay up to date on their conditions. Vital signs, weight, blood pressure, and heart rate are some of the most common types of physiological data that can be tracked with remote patient monitoring.

The goal of these telemedicine solutions is to make it easier for people to get care, improve clinical outcomes, and lower healthcare costs.

Easing financial burdens on healthcare systems

Healthcare in rural areas tends to be more expensive because there are fewer people living there and hospitals have higher operating costs per person. No matter how many or few people are in the hospital, the staff stays the same.

Virtual care can be a good way to keep healthcare costs down and avoid more expensive options like in-person care and visits to the emergency room. For example, virtual care can help with preventative care and early detection, which frees up valuable space and medical staff. Managing chronic conditions online can also cut down on unnecessary hospital stays and readmissions, which saves money for both the patient and the hospital. Virtual care saves money and improves health by taking care of problems before they get worse and cost more to fix.

Addressing staffing shortages

Clinical staffing shortages have hurt the whole health care industry, but rural health care systems may be hit the hardest because they have less money, fewer resources, and are in more remote areas. With virtual care, healthcare professionals from all over the country who can provide services remotely can be hired instead of just those in rural areas.

Telesitting is another way that telehealth can help healthcare workers. Telesitting is a remote patient observation system that lets one clinical technician watch 12–16 patients at the same time. Telesitting keeps track of what patients do and lets staff know if there are any problems. This makes patients safer, saves money, and helps overworked clinicians.

Even though healthcare systems in rural areas face a lot of problems right now, virtual care solutions can help ease financial and staffing burdens, improve the patient experience, and make it easier for more people to get care.

Discover what’s possible

Before healthcare organizations can get the most out of their AI investments, clinicians and the general public need to learn more about how AI-assisted healthcare can save lives and money.

With AI, training in healthcare could get a lot better. Accenture says that half of all healthcare organizations are planning to use AI to help people learn.

The cost of health care could go down. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research says that more widespread use of AI could save up to $360 billion a year in healthcare costs (5%–10%) without lowering quality or access.

Clinicians could spend more time directly caring for patients. 40% of the time people spend working in healthcare could be made better by generative AI.

Clinicians and IT teams need to know about the latest developments in AI and how they can be used. This includes switching from accelerated computing that is only powered by CPUs to accelerated computing that is also powered by GPUs. This will make it easier to manage data and get fast, accurate results.

AI technology, like AI software and accelerated infrastructure, should be taught earlier in healthcare training so that clinicians can recommend useful new applications as their careers progress.

Talk to your CDW account manager about your NVIDIA AI options today, or call 800.800.4239.

How is AI making innovation happen faster right now?

AI seems to have a lot of potential in healthcare, but it can be hard to know where to start investing to get the best return.

AI is already making people’s lives better in ways that can be measured. Use these successes to show how AI has the potential to help healthcare organizations cut costs and improve patient outcomes at the same time.

Medical Imaging

Medical Imaging: Imaging tools powered by AI are helping doctors find, measure, and predict the risks of tumors. A global survey done by the European Society of Radiology found that 30% of radiologists say they already use AI in their work.

AI imaging tools can also help train AI solutions with fake images and make reports. This gives more accurate results and gives clinicians and staff more time to work on their most important projects.

Drug Discovery

Researchers can model millions of molecules using AI-powered tools. These tools can find patterns in proteins, predict properties, build 3D structures, and make new proteins.

All of this makes it much faster to test drugs and find new ones. A new survey by Atheneum and Proscia shows that 82% of life sciences organizations using digital pathology have started to use AI because it saves time and money.

Genomics

As the cost of instruments has gone down, health care organizations have started to focus more on analysis. Analysts are better able to find rare diseases and make personalized treatments by using AI tools and hardware made for AI tasks.

In fact, The New England Journal of Medicine published a record-breaking method, with help from NVIDIA, that sequenced a whole genome in just over seven hours.

Dr. Giovanna Carpi and her team at Purdue University were able to do analyses 27 times faster and for five times less money with NVIDIA GPU processing than with traditional CPU processing.

Find the right tools for the job

The more information you get from a model, the bigger it is. When the outcome of a patient depends on how much data is collected and how quickly and accurately it is analyzed, organizations must have infrastructure that is designed for efficient processing.

NVIDIA is bringing healthcare into the modern era of GPU-powered computing with a set of accelerated computing solutions that are part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise family, which is software for production AI from start to finish.

Using the NVIDIA ClaraTM framework, which is part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise, healthcare organizations have created blueprints for two new proteins, made genomic processing 30 times faster with Parabricks®, and cut data preparation time in one radiology department from eight months to one day by using MONAI-powered imaging solutions.

The NVIDIA BioNeMo generative AI cloud service makes a big difference in how fast structures and functions of proteins and biomolecules can be made. These speeds up the process of making new drug candidates.

Partner with trusted experts

Even if you buy all the right equipment, there’s no guarantee that the data you collect will help the organization.

To help you get the most out of your data, CDW brings together infrastructure from close partners like NVIDIA with experts who know how to use it. CDW implements the software, hardware, and services that are needed to put AI solutions in place that are perfect for your company’s needs.

Using the hybrid cloud to help healthcare digital transformation projects

Because health data is so sensitive, it has taken longer for healthcare organizations to move to the cloud. Healthcare organizations need to speed up their digital transformation efforts more than ever to keep up with the fast-paced and always-changing market of today.

Digital transformation in healthcare is the process of using digital technologies to create or change workflow processes and the way patients interact with them. Digital transformation can help businesses keep up with changing business needs and market demands while letting them focus on making money from their digital assets.

Hybrid cloud technology can make health system apps and data more scalable, agile, flexible, and cost-effective by combining the best parts of private cloud, public cloud, and on-premises infrastructure. Because of this, the healthcare workflow pipeline can be made faster and safer.

Here are a few reasons why healthcare organizations of all sizes should use hybrid cloud technology.

Scalability

Because each medical workflow has needs and requirements that are unique to the healthcare organization, it is important to make sure that their infrastructure is safe, scalable, and flexible.

Hybrid cloud gives health systems the flexibility they need by combining public cloud resources with the infrastructure they already have. This lets important operational workflows be changed, which improves efficiency and lowers operating costs, both of which are important for scalability and sustainability. When used well, hybrid cloud solutions can give healthcare organizations more resources than they need on demand while making the most of their investments in infrastructure.

Flexibility and Agility

Many healthcare organizations have adopted a cloud-smart mindset in order to stay competitive and responsive in a market where flexibility and agility are key.

In a hybrid cloud model, healthcare organizations can put workloads in private or public clouds and switch between them as their needs and budgets change. This gives them more freedom to plan and manage operations and more options for putting data and applications where they will work best for their business. Because of this, healthcare organizations are also able to move some workloads to a public cloud when their private cloud needs to handle sudden spikes in demand.

A hybrid cloud environment can also help healthcare organizations respond quickly to changing situations or opportunities by letting them quickly add or remove resources as needed. A core principle of a digital business is that it needs to be able to adapt and change direction quickly. Healthcare organizations need to use public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises resources to gain the agility they need to gain a competitive edge.

Hybrid cloud solutions can be a great way to connect legacy apps and infrastructure to modern workloads because they are flexible and quick to change.

Cost Optimization

A hybrid cloud environment can also help healthcare organizations make the most of their limited budgets and find a good balance between cost, performance, and availability as their needs change.

By moving workloads to scalable clouds, healthcare organizations can have more flexible capacity and save money by using dynamic pricing based on “pay-as-you-go” consumption models instead of fixed prices. Resources can be put online quickly, and they can also be taken offline quickly.

Because healthcare workflows can be very complicated, keeping on-premises infrastructure up to date can be more expensive than keeping cloud infrastructure up to date, especially in disaster recovery environments.

Why should you use Hybrid Cloud Solutions to update your healthcare environment?

Since a hybrid cloud model combines the benefits of on-premises with the scalability, flexibility, agility, and low cost of the public cloud, it’s easy to see why it’s the infrastructure model of choice for healthcare organizations that want to digitally transform their environments.

Keeping up with current digital health strategies and using new technology well can help your healthcare organization become more competitive and flexible. This will help future-proof your business model and improve patient outcomes in the process.