Do CIOs Need a New Virtual Care Strategy?

A new study finds that executives are targeting virtual care and RPM as key strategies over the next couple years to improve patient engagement, but the technologies they’re using now aren’t sustainable.

Healthcare leaders are becoming very interested in what their patients have to say – but they may need to revamp their virtual care strategies to make that happen.

A new report from Sage Growth Partners finds that patient experience is moving quickly to the top of the list of strategic initiatives, and that executives are targeting virtual care and digital health as key channels to get in front of patients. At the same time, current virtual care platforms aren’t working well, and almost 80% say they may invest in new core platforms within the next three years.

That’s a lot to take in for healthcare leaders at a time of economic upheaval. But it points to a continuing problem coming out of the COVID pandemic: Hospital-based virtual care models aren’t seeing a tremendous amount of use, most often because they’re not giving patients what they want or need.

"Patient experience has been on a steady climb up the C-suite agenda, and it's now firmly at the top,"  Sage Growth Partners CEO Dan D'Orazio said in a press release accompanying the new report. "Healthcare leaders recognize that to remain competitive, meeting consumer expectations for digital engagement is no longer optional, it is a top priority.”

According to the survey, almost three of every four healthcare leaders see virtual care as integral to their care delivery model, yet less than 30% are seeing “significant” ROI from their current virtual care models.

The continuing federal shutdown isn’t helping. Pandemic-era waivers that improved access to and Medicare coverage for telehealth services and the CMS-based Acute Hospital Care at Home (AHCaH) model have expired.  And while advocates are lobbying Congress to either extend those waivers or make them permanent, there’s been no movement toward that yet. This means telehealth coverage has shifted back to pre-COVID guidelines, which restricted how, when and where virtual care could be used and what types of care providers could use it.

The simple fact is that not enough patients are using virtual care and digital health, and it’s not just because they want to see their doctor in person. Many virtual care platforms are too clunky and complex, forcing patients to jump through too many hoops. Clinicians, meanwhile, often see virtual care as another task added to already crowded workflows, creating more work and more stress.

As it stands now, according to the survey, almost 60% of executives say their organizations are offering virtual primary care, and that same percentage is offering remote patient monitoring (RPM), while half are offering telestroke services. Meanwhile, half of the executives surveyed say telehealth platforms and 47% of those executives say RPM are among the top five digital health priorities for the next two years.

That’s putting a lot of pressure on CIOs, Chief Digital Health Officers and Chief Transformation Officers to develop a virtual care strategy that not only meets patient needs, but also produces enough ROI to be scalable and sustainable.

Technology integration plays a key role in those plans. Executives list integration with the EHR and IT platforms, improved usability, and AI integration as top priorities, and more than 80% say AI will have a meaningful impact on how they create virtual care programs that use RPM and deliver services to the home.

"Healthcare executives are caught between competing pressures,"  Stephanie Kovalick, Sage Growth Partners’ Chief Strategy Officer, said in the press release "They understand that investing in digital health and virtual care is critical for improving patient experience, but demonstrating ROI remains elusive. The organizations that succeed will be those that can best balance strategic investment with operational efficiency, and that includes properly leveraging AI to drive both clinical and administrative improvements."