Virtual Care

Evolving industry drivers require providers to meet patients where they are.

Health systems continue to develop their virtual care programs to meet changing consumer, payer and provider expectations. Industry drivers like labor shortages, an aging population, and nontraditional entrants to healthcare from big tech and retail provide a uniquely different set of challenges for healthcare organizations. The need to connect patients and providers outside of hospital walls continues to be a top priority for healthcare organizations as they mature their virtual care strategy to shift more care closer to home.

Virtual appointments, typically delivered via video, telephonic or asynchronous (store-and-forward) modalities, are typically the first step health systems take on the virtual care journey. Most organizations provide patients access to their own providers for remote delivery of primary, specialty and ancillary care. While some offer on-demand virtual appointments for urgent same-day appointments with providers outside of the organization.

As health systems progress on their virtual care journey, many of our clients are adding remote acute care delivery for patients with emergent conditions traditionally managed in urgent care settings. Others are adding remote care post-acute for higher acuity patients seen in emergency departments. In-home monitoring via devices such as pulse oximeters, combined with instructions for symptom reporting, allows patients to continue receiving high quality care in the comfort of their home. For those patients that need to be hospitalized, many of our clients are investing in inpatient virtual care delivery models such as tele-rounding, specialist consultation and tele-surveillance.

WWT partners with healthcare organizations to advance virtual care programs by optimizing, connecting or augmenting existing technologies. As virtual care remains an integral part of care delivery, we help our clients build a scalable future to improve consumer, patient and provider experience while driving better care outcomes.

Healthcare organizations are expanding their remote monitoring programs to keep healthy people healthy and identify early risk for those with existing conditions.

For healthy populations, the advent of smart technology allows clinicians to incorporate consumer-wearable data into their care plans. Wearable technology allows clinicians to help healthy patients set and meet wellness goals. For patients with existing chronic or acute conditions, remote patient monitoring (RPM) using autonomous data collection from IoT-enabled medical devices and sensors provides actionable insights for early intervention.

Our health system clients are also planning for a future where hospital-at-home programs will be an expected part of care delivery. A solid remote monitoring strategy allows organizations to connect the technology, data, people and processes necessary to deliver hospital care at home.

Whether you are beginning your RPM journey or establishing a hospital-at-home program, WWT can help build and transform your remote monitoring strategy to improve patient outcomes, enhance the clinician and provider experience, and reduce cost of care.

While remote visits and monitoring are certainly the foundation for virtual care delivery, for health systems to successfully care for patients closer to home, the larger strategy should include on-demand, digital care tools. Self-service applications expand the reach of clinicians and allow patients accustomed to convenient consumer digital applications to engage in their care journey when needed.

Our health system clients are implementing digital tools, available 24/7, to help patients determine if they need care. Symptom checkers based on simple rules engines can help patients identify medical attention is needed. More advanced digital tools, like AI-powered chatbots, can help determine the level of care needed. Additionally, incorporating patient data from health records into these digital apps can create personalized, patient-specific care recommendations.

Providers are increasingly adopting therapeutic digital tools such as digital therapeutics (DTx) and prescription digital therapeutics (PTx) as part of their virtual care strategy. Unlike solutions that simply help diagnose or identify risk of disease, these digital tools help our clients deliver therapeutic intervention for specific conditions.

At WWT, we help our healthcare partners select, build and integrate digital care tools as part of their virtual care strategy.  We help clients build and transform remote monitoring solutions to improve patient outcomes, enhance the clinician and provider experience, and reduce cost of care. We also help our healthcare partners leverage existing technology investments or new, best-of-breed applications, to serve as an extension of their care teams to reach more patients anywhere, any time.