Many health systems’ journeys into wide-scale virtual care really began with the urgent need to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some health systems have been able to streamline and standardize processes across their extensive networks, even extending care to such locations as rural schools. Success lies in strategic collaboration between leaders who prioritize new virtual care areas, demonstrate value, and ensure seamless integration with staff, patients and stakeholders.
Transitioning from decentralized efforts to a unified framework is one way a health system can achieve notable milestones such as significant time savings for nursing staff and securing grants for community-based care initiatives. Such a unified approach can ensure sustainable growth and technological integration, delivering effective virtual care experiences to diverse communities.
Scott Wilson, senior director, HHS enterprise growth strategy, at Teladoc Health, will address this subject along with two co-speakers from Valley Health System at a HIMSS25 educational session entitled “Unlocking Virtual Care: A Collaborative Approach to Expansion and Success.”
Scott Wilson leads ambulatory care and general platform strategy for Teladoc Health’s hospital and health systems division. He holds a master’s degree in communications and leadership theory from Gonzaga University and has extensive experience in health system IT and clinical and business operations, as well as in the public health and environmental health sectors.
We spoke with Scott to get a sneak preview of this timely HIMSS25 session.
Q. You’ll be talking about realizing value from telehealth programs. How can this be done?
A. For many health systems, their first foray with virtual care came during the pandemic. While telehealth offers immense value during times of crisis – whether global pandemic, natural disaster or staffing emergency – health systems are quickly learning the staying power of these programs within their organizations to help achieve clinical, operational and business goals.
However, disjointed approaches to implementing virtual care – including the technologies, workflows, protocols, governance, and clinical and business objectives involved – may actually lead to increased costs and often can lead to poor patient and care team experiences, making it difficult to realize value.
By taking an enterprise systems approach to virtual care planning, implementation and expansion, leaders at Valley Health were able to avoid this pitfall and maximize the benefits of virtual care for their patients, care teams and their health system in general.
At HIMSS25, I’ll be joined by Carmen Clipper, vice president, planning and growth, at Valley Health System, and Delores A. Gehr, RN, chief nursing officer and director, patient care services, at Valley Health System, to discuss how their approach to virtual care allowed them to streamline and standardize processes across their extensive network.
With more than 100 locations, their journey reflects what many health systems are struggling with today as they look to optimize clinical and operational programs across their network.
The lessons they’ve learned through this approach to virtual care planning and implementation offer valuable takeaways for others embarking on similar health IT initiatives, as health systems should prioritize the following:
- Understand how the needs of individual clinical/business groups are tied to the needs of others, and to the enterprise as a whole.
- Identify key stakeholders who will be critical to overall success, and their definitions of “value.”
- Identify the best places to start to get results that speak directly to the value needs.
- Build clinical and business champions and momentum for the next steps.
- Ensure the best potential to address organizational workforce, clinical, business and IT needs while improving access to care, patient experience and quality outcomes.
Q. What kind of virtual care will you be discussing and how is it being used in healthcare in the context of your session’s content?
A. Our discussion will focus on an enterprise approach to virtual care that predominantly uses Teladoc Health’s Solo enterprise virtual care ecosystem. At Valley Health, this offers the care team a consistent access point for delivering virtual care. Care teams also can leverage this interface to access more advanced capabilities that enhance care delivery.
For example, with Virtual Sitter with AI assistance, a single, remote staff member now can monitor significantly more patients than an in-person sitter, helping to increase the capacity of healthcare inpatient teams and significantly reduce costs. Other examples of telehealth-enabled support include virtual nursing, direct-to-patient video visits, and hybrid ambulatory and in-patient virtual specialty consults.
The other piece of the technology we’ll be discussing includes the physical elements that help optimize the impact of telehealth: in-room and mobile telemedicine endpoint devices. Purpose-built devices empower care teams to deliver virtual care, no matter where you are within an organization.
This includes patient-side devices like TVs, carts and tablets. These devices are purpose-built for telemedicine and are designed to support enterprise virtual care today and into the future.
Finally, the technology is integrated with the EHR, ensuring all clinically relevant data is captured for a holistic view of patient care.
When considering patient experiences, this enterprise approach to enable direct-to-patient visits, on-demand consumer visits, and in-person hybrid video visits in clinics and hospitals helps meet patients on their own terms to expand access to care.
Q. What is one of the various takeaways you hope HIMSS25 attendees will leave your session with and be able to apply when they return home to their organizations?
A. The overarching takeaway is that a collaborative, enterprise approach to virtual care planning and expansion can ensure holistic, scalable and patient-centered results to achieve maximum value – aligning technology, workflows and people for sustainable, high-quality care across the health system.
However, the learnings we’ll cover are applicable across any process improvement initiatives that require an enterprise approach or new approaches to governance to ensure success.
As health systems look to extend their current resources to optimize patient care, outcomes and experiences, we hope Valley Health’s experiences and our discussion offers strategies and insights for overcoming potential obstacles to virtual care adoption and scalability, including governance, staff change management, interoperability challenges and technology considerations.
Many of these lessons are transferable to other healthcare IT change management processes, offering versatile lessons for attendees.
Wilson’s session, “Unlocking Virtual Care: A Collaborative Approach to Expansion and Success,” is scheduled for Thursday March 6 at 9:45 a.m. at HIMSS25 in Las Vegas.
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Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org
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