How Virtual Care Helps Improve the Health of Populations
Planning for the care of people with multiple complex chronic conditions is critical as baby boomers continue to become eligible for Medicare. Improving the health of people with multiple chronic conditions will decrease high hospital readmission rates while enhancing patients’ quality of life.
Better Health: Virtual care dashboards helps administrators review the health of specific patient populations and analyze trends across shared characteristics such as conditions, SDOHs, etc. Dashboards also helps agencies report out on the population health results of referral partners.
How Virtual Care Helps Improve the Patient Experience
Virtual care makes care delivery more efficient while also elevating the patient experience. Virtual visits, secure messaging, condition-specific messages, RPM, and assessments support and engage patients as they age and heal at home – giving them more tools in their role in self-care and more control over their health.
Better Experience: Virtual care technology helps clinicians check-in with patients, monitor, triage, and care for them in real-time. Clinicians can interact with the patients through video, messaging, RPM, and assessment tools to encourage healthier lifestyles, treatment/medication adherence, and routine collecting/sending of their vitals. By engaging patients via multiple touchpoints, clinicians can constantly assess patient risks for rehospitalization and coach patients on better self-care.
How Virtual Care Helps Reduce the Cost of Healthcare
According to the New England Journal of Medicine, people with chronic conditions receive only 56% of recommended preventive health care services. Yet, the CDC indicates that chronic disease accounts for approximately 75% of the nation’s aggregate health care spending and the related treatment is responsible for 96 cents per dollar for Medicare and 83 cents per dollar for Medicaid. Given the increased healthcare challenges as our population ages, organizations are looking to technology to reduce the cost of care – while improving overall and individual outcomes.
Lower Costs: Virtual care can decrease travel time and travel costs for clinicians and patients. Conducting virtual visits and consults allows “drive time” to be converted to “patient time.” Secure video conferencing technology helps patients access care in a more convenient manner, on their schedule, while enabling care team staff to see more patients, more frequently. And, agencies can provide virtual teletriage support afterhours and on the weekends – helping to mitigate the need to send out a clinician or request that the patient make a trip to the ER if the situation can be addressed over video or secure messaging.
How Virtual Care Helps Enhance Clinician Experience
Even before the pandemic, work-related burnout was an acute problem in healthcare. Staffing remains a top concern for home health and hospice organizations which are struggling to recruit and retain top talent. Administrators are aiming to increase clinician productivity but face the risk of staff exhaustion and overwork.
Greater Satisfaction: As a result of using virtual care, clinicians are more satisfied with their ability to better manage their patients, treat more patients, and even provide care during evenings or weekends. Providing this flexibility to staff not only helps agencies more effectively recruit and retain qualified staff, but it increases their efficiency as the demand for home health will only increase as Baby Boomers age. Given the immediacy and impact of virtual care, one can expect that it will also drive greater staff satisfaction, retention, and engagement – thus, helping a healthcare organization achieve the Quadruple Aim.