Use these best practices to improve virtual care

Post-pandemic virtual care is made easier with the help of platform solutions, integration, and clinical automation.

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.