PERSPECTIVE

Leading the Virtual Healthcare Evolution

Hospitals and health systems must expect significant changes driven by advancements in technology, evolving patient needs, and broader healthcare trends. While the future is inherently uncertain, at least one trend continues to expand and positively contributes to how patients receive care – telehealth.

Rick Newell , MD, MPH

Chief Transformation Officer

Published June 21, 2023

Virtual Care Delivery Matters

Telehealth and virtual care are now integral parts of healthcare delivery. Patients now have increased access to remote consultations, diagnosis, and monitoring, which reduces the need for in-person visits. It’s also becoming more of a consumer expectation, and many patients choose where to receive care based on the level of virtual offerings available.

Vituity has long recognized the potential value of telehealth and began investing in virtual care several years before the pandemic. This head start has allowed us to rapidly scale many virtual and hybrid services that benefit our hospital clients and patients.

The Benefits of Telehealth

Virtual care offers benefits for Vituity and its hospital clients. Chief among these is the ability to quickly scale services without hiring clinicians at each location. This makes delivering care more cost-effective, provides more flexible coverage, and helps to alleviate clinician shortages (especially in high-demand fields like psychiatry and neurology).

Many of our telehealth services integrate with in-person practice. In southern Illinois, for example, a single critical care team provides both virtual and face-to-face coverage across a four-hospital region. This flexible staffing model allows community hospitals to operate ICUs more efficiently without compromising quality or patient experience.

Vituity Telehealth Solutions

Many organizations still view telehealth as a separate practice line, but at Vituity, it’s simply healthcare. We believe that all our clinical services have the potential to use telehealth in some form.

Some of the more innovative ways we’re delivering virtual care include:

Yafa Minazad, DO, and Arbi Ohanian, MD, before joining Vituity, had one of the first practices in the country to offer virtual and in-person neuro hospitalist coverage. Vituity continues to be one of the very few groups providing this service.

Vituity’s EmPATH solution, which provides short-term care for acute behavioral health complaints, uses telehealth to fill gaps in psychiatrist coverage. This ensures that every new patient receives an immediate and expert assessment.

Vituity clinicians consult across the continuum of care to ensure excellence in wound care, infectious disease management, and other key clinical areas.

The Future of Telehealth Innovation

The pandemic normalized telehealth for patients, physicians, health systems, and payers. At Vituity, we’ve realized that almost any type of care can happen virtually, and we have the numbers to prove that telehealth quality is consistent with in-person care.

The next frontier for telehealth will involve peripheral devices that help virtual providers better assess patients. We’re not yet at the stage where every household has a digital stethoscope or pulse ox monitor. However, we could set up pods in skilled nursing facilities, schools, and workplaces to facilitate virtual examinations.

We’re also involved in innovating new care technologies. One of our practice sites is currently trialing an abdominal palpation device invented by one of our front-line physicians. This technology could inform the need for abdominal imaging without an in-person examination.

The ability to get patients the care they need when and where they need it and, in the manner, they want it is the great promise of telehealth. Vituity is excited to lead this evolution.

Read more about ways to meet patients where they are.

Partnering to improve patient lives

Vituity branding with wave pattern footer