By Julie Earley, Managing Director, Virtual Care Solutions

Historically the cost of implementing new technology, along with the disruption and the work effort of maintaining it, outweighed the benefits of implementation for many healthcare organizations (HCOs). In this new era of consumerism in healthcare, though, learning to adopt new technologies early and implement them quickly has become a market differentiator for HCOs. As you plan for 2021, are you building toward long-term strategic virtual care capabilities?

Enterprise platform strategy vs. application-by-application strategy

Prior to the pandemic, service lines could get away with implementing myriad applications without carefully considering the patient experience. Patients were not typically engaged with HCOs digitally. A recent Frost & Sullivan report, however, predicts that 35% of patient interactions will be digital in 2021, making now the time to review telehealth applications adopted during the crisis and pivot toward creating a sustained long-term adoption platform.

Strategies for creating a strong virtual care platform

We have compiled the following guidelines to help you create an enterprise-wide platform strategy that increases provider and patient confidence and grows your market share in 2021 and beyond.

Streamline the consumer experience

• Leverage a few choice platforms across the enterprise to create a streamlined experience for patients and healthcare workers.
• Simplify your solutions and integrate them into clinical workflows to provide frictionless consumer and patient experiences. Simpler solutions can sustain and scale more easily with virtual care services growth.
• Build a strategy for open communication and agreement across leadership. Virtual care requires more touchpoints with the patient because of increased data collection and the need to support patients’ technology literacy, so HCOs must manage the patient experience at an enterprise level.

Leverage your investment

• Recognize that there is no single solution available to meet your needs and reuse existing solutions when possible.
• Align virtual care solutions to defined business use cases, outcomes, and impacted workflows to determine which platform best meets the need of the community.

Grow the service line and your market share

An enterprise-wide platform strategy will better support the expansion of your virtual care service line, increasing your market share. In fact, some visits are more convenient virtually, like adolescent mental health, since barriers like relying on a parent’s work schedule and finding transportation are removed.

The newly empowered consumer will shift to healthcare organizations that offer a differentiated digital-first strategy. Offering easy-to-use technology tools that consumers crave builds brand loyalty and helps attract added market share.

Have you evaluated your strategy? Email us if you’d like to discuss it with us!