Report Details 4 Imperatives of Virtual Care Growth

A recent report from TheAcademy details four key considerations for health systems looking to grow and further integrate virtual care into their care delivery models, including gaining operational buy-in and comprehensive vendor partnerships.

As described in the report, virtual care has become more of a healthcare essential rather than a luxury. A recent survey indicated that a majority of health system executives (93 percent) reported that the growth of virtual health offerings is part of their overall plans for the future.

For this report, which was commissioned by Teladoc Health, TheAcademy surveyed chief strategy officers, chief medical information officers, and population health leaders from 38 health systems.

Though executives want to establish an integrated, customer-focused, and scaled virtual care strategy, they are not there yet, the report notes. When asked to rank their system's performance on virtual health, executives scored overall performance at 2.9 on a scale of one to five, with one signifying poor performance.

Specifically, when asked about satisfaction with virtual health performance, executives indicated satisfaction with the technical measures of virtual health performance, including security, reliability, scalability, and efficiency. But they ranked other performance indicators, like care model design, workforce readiness, and clinician satisfaction, relatively low.

This indicates a need for wraparound functions that can help improve virtual health performance.

Summarized into four imperatives, the required next steps relate to changing digital health strategies that exist in name only, swapping transactional vendor contacts for true partnerships, achieving virtual care integration through securing operational buy-in, and being cautious when scaling virtual care programs.

The report detailed two main reasons as to why, in some cases, digital health strategies exist in name only: health system approaches to virtual care have been reactive so far, and the fact that health systems use digital solutions to enable strategy but haven't prioritized digital as a strategy itself. Health systems must consider their organizational goals relating to virtual care, including the types of virtual care markets they see themselves in.

The second imperative noted that succeeding in consumerism requires health systems trading transactional vendor contracts for true partnerships. Along with heated competition in the digital healthcare landscape, patient trust in the local health system has been fading.

Thus, many health systems are working with an industrial company to grow their care offerings, and 77 percent are in the process of partnering with external organizations on digital health. But these partnerships must be productive, characterized by flexibility, ongoing communication, culture and values alignment, and willingness to hear feedback, the executives said.

The third imperative is that health systems prioritize operational buy-in from the beginning when aiming to achieve virtual care integration. Buy-in can be a barrier when introducing new technology, leading to delays and curbing the efficacy of new solutions.

Thus, the report notes that early buy-in from operational leaders is necessary as they can help mitigate potential hurdles to use and boost uptake among clinicians.

Lastly, the report noted that scaling virtual care programs is often seen as a catch-22. In dealing with care fragmentation, health systems often need to scale virtual care solutions. However, when an organization doesn’t scale or scales poorly, care will continue to be fragmented.

Avoiding this issue often requires health systems to assess virtual health maturity by viewing key indicator performances, including governance, data and technology management, and financial sustainability.