Partner Perspective: Mapping Out a Blueprint for Successful Inpatient Virtual Care

The persistent challenges healthcare leaders face manifest in unique ways for CIOs. First, technology is advancing fast, with compelling new capabilities in AI and virtual care technology topping the list. Yet, ongoing workforce challenges, especially among qualified clinical staff, add significantly to the financial pressures, limiting the time and budget healthcare organizations have available to innovate with new technologies.

CIOs are between a rock and a hard place. The nursing workforce has already shrunk by 100,000 nurses, while nearly 900,000 more nurses, or almost one-fifth of the 4.5 million registered nurses nationwide, plan to leave due to stress, burnout and retirement by 2027. Initiatives like virtual care that could help hospitals and inpatient facilities reduce the burden on their staff, lower costs, and improve patient outcomes seem out of reach.

With an eye toward the long game, CIOs can take four key considerations into account to demonstrate the value of virtual care and create a self-sustaining roadmap for successful adoption. Ultimately, these considerations help justify that virtual care is more than video calls and mobile apps. Done well, it becomes a collaborative, strategic function that integrates in-person and remote care, made possible by blending scalable technology and clinical expertise, to deliver long-term value to the organization.

1. Delivering tangible ROI

First and foremost, technology investments, including virtual care initiatives, need to deliver tangible return on investment (ROI). Working together, CIOs and clinical leadership can achieve measurable short-term and long-term outcomes from virtual care programs. Starting with virtual sitting and safety observation initiatives, short-term outcomes may include fewer patient falls and other adverse incidents, shorter stays and lower overall risk. Over time, other key metrics may also see gains, such as patient and staff satisfaction.

Expanding beyond virtual sitting to virtual nursing, hospitals can gain greater operational efficiency by implementing episodic consultation capabilities, which can reduce the cost of multiple critical activities, including daily admission and discharge workflows, rounding and consulting. This approach can also reduce the cost and expand the reach of internal mentoring or coaching programs by connecting experienced clinicians with newer staff regardless of where they are based.

An example of the measurable impacts of extending the reach of clinical staff beyond physical boundaries is a small health system with a single certified wound and ostomy nurse serving two facilities, located 30 miles apart. Using their virtual nursing platform’s episodic care capabilities, the nurse performs video consults remotely, saving precious time and mileage while giving patients access to the specialist care they need.

2. Putting the foundation in place for scalable virtual care programs

While many organizations have experimented with some form of virtual sitting or virtual nursing, without the right focus on foundational success factors, they struggle to measure ROI and justify expansion. For example, if clinical teams aren’t involved in the planning and implementation process, workflows may be out of sync with best practices, hampering adoption. CIOs need to ensure that clinical teams are involved from the start to design workflows and put clinical change management programs in place.

In addition, if clinicians and patients have a poor experience with video quality and dropped calls, it further hinders adoption. CIOs need to take hardware and connectivity reliability into account as foundational to success. Lastly, because cost is such an important factor, CIOs need to ensure that the solution they choose provides robust analytics to manage key performance metrics, making it possible to document ROI and make informed decisions for the best ways to optimize and scale virtual care for their organization.

3. Considering vendor consolidation to reduce TCO

Many hospitals have pieced together separate solutions to support their virtual care initiatives, including two-way video, continuous monitoring, episodic care, analytics, and more. CIOs have the opportunity to reduce costs and improve reliability by identifying vendor solutions that bring together all the capabilities they need. CIOs should prioritize integration, ensuring the consolidated solution supports multiple continuous and episodic use cases as well as open, real-time data flows and workflow automation via APIs and native integrations to critical systems like a hospital’s EHR.

4. Viewing virtual care adoption as a self-funded maturity model

Virtual care is not an all or nothing program. CIOs that view virtual care as a phased process have the highest success with adoption and expansion. The phased process starts with a single use case, typically virtual sitting, and progresses toward an organization-wide virtual care program that integrates with in-person care.

Virtual sitting equips trained, unlicensed virtual sitters to use video and audio connections to watch over patients and improve overall safety, making it a natural starting point. And it can have an immediate and quantifiable impact – for example, a typical 250-bed hospital can realize over $2.5 million each year in cost savings. By replacing up to 75% of 1:1 sitters with a continuous monitoring application, CIOs can quantify cost savings from their investment and justify allocating budget to implement the next phase. Additionally, virtual safety observation is proven to drive better patient outcomes – often a 50% reduction in falls across the organization.

From there, organizations can expand to virtual nursing, using two effective models. The “clinical resource model” uses virtual nurses primarily to offload documentation activities and give bedside teams more time for direct patient care. The “expert oversight model” uses experienced virtual nurses to oversee a cohort of complex patients and provide clinical insight and nurse mentorship to bedside staff.

At each phase, virtual nursing can remain cost-neutral by rolling ROI over from one phase to the next. For example, a large health system scaled a program across the enterprise to improve the safety of at-risk patients and optimize labor costs, resulting in $23 million in labor cost savings.

Conclusion

Virtual nursing initiatives offer CIOs a path forward from being stuck between a rock and a hard place. With short-term and long-term gains that have a direct impact on the quality and cost of patient care, virtual nursing programs enable the most efficient, modern version of the essential work clinicians do each day. Keeping four key considerations in mind, CIOs can implement a self-sustaining roadmap to keep patients and clinicians safe, lower the cost of care, and free up staff to do their best work – delivering long-term value to the organization.

Adam McMullin is CEO of AvaSure®, an intelligent virtual care platform that deploys AI-powered virtual sitting and virtual nursing solutions, meets the highest enterprise IT standards, and drives measurable outcomes with support from care experts. AvaSure consistently delivers a 6x ROI and has been recognized by KLAS Research as the #1 solution for reducing the cost of care. With a team of 15% nurses, AvaSure is a trusted partner of 1,100+ hospitals with experience in over 5,000 deployments.