Virtual Care: Benefits, Challenges, and Prospects Share: ABTO Software Date Published 6 December 2023 Categories Analysis, Blog, Research Reading Time 5-Minute Read The demand of modern-day virtual care is being driven by the dynamic evolution and popularization of technology. The recent coronavirus pandemic has forced healthcare providers, their patients, and authorities to reconsider how different healthcare-related services can be conveniently delivered outside traditional hospital settings. This has revealed future-proof opportunities for mature healthcare leaders that can facilitate their overall performance, flexibility, scalability, and quality of service. In this short overview, we’ll discuss virtual care, its types, use cases, and benefits for both healthcare providers and individuals. Virtual Care Market Overview The demand of modern-day virtual care is driven by the dynamic evolution and popularization of technology. The predominance of various chronic conditions, staff shortage, and the ever-present need for cost-efficient healthcare options are also important factors. Currently, the largest market for implementing virtual health is the United States. The reasons for this include an established infrastructure in the healthcare segment, computational technology, and appropriate government regulations. Virtual Care Virtual care is the use of technology to resolve healthcare limitations (eg. geographical barriers) to facilitate healthcare accessibility and convenience. Virtual health is implemented to deliver healthcare-related services by leveraging computational advances. These comprise telemedicine and telehealth software, as well as so-called telepharmacy solutions. Virtual care is used to enable remote consultations, remote appointments and follow-ups, and secure channels (eg. instant messaging, audio, video), as well as straightforward EHR/EMR access. Remote Patient Monitoring Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is the use of applications, medical devices, and other related advancements to assess and track key health indicators (eg. heart rate, blood sugar levels, sleep, energy). This practice empowers professionals to overview and analyze health conditions from anywhere and anytime. That way, health indicators, symptoms, allergies, treatment and medication adherence, along with other key factors, can be easily tracked outside conventional clinical settings. RPM adoption is used to enable early detection, data-driven diagnosis and treatment, patient motivation and self-management, and preventive intervention. Data-Driven Diagnostics and Triage Data-driven diagnostics is the integration of applications that leverage artificial intelligence to meet patient needs in a more targeted manner. Insight-driven diagnostics and triage is performed by using virtual platforms that simplify healthcare assessment. It drives pattern recognition and analysis, informed decision-making, disease prognosis, risk assessment, and other critical processes. Data Processing and Analytics Data processing and analytics is the integration of applications that employ artificial intelligence and Big Data with nationwide healthcare databases. Data processing and analytics is utilized to process data collected across sources to extract valuable information. This enables image recognition and analysis, data extraction, predictive analytics to identify patient outcomes, and automated anomaly detection to identify unusual patterns. Virtual Consultations and Follow-Ups By using computer technology, healthcare companies can enable: online appointments, routine follow-ups and check-ups from anywhere and anytime easy access in remote, underserved areas timely intervention second opinion health education lifestyle counseling. Such technology can also reduce the number of no-show medical appointments, simplify administration, and afford greater customer reach. Pain Management By adopting modern innovation, healthcare organizations can implement: remote consultations (medication management, prescription refills) remote monitoring (pain levels, treatment adherence and efficiency) support groups and counseling remote non-pharmacological cognitive-behavioral therapy. By innovating, they can also optimize infrastructure, minimize overload and burnout among employees, and continue to provide care continuity, patient satisfaction and loyalty, and, accordingly, higher revenue. Emergency Services Speaking about emergency services, virtual care can improve remote triage and interpretation to support accurate diagnosis and treatment, as well as on-site coordination and guidance. It can also further post-emergency monitoring. It can also allow medical professionals to address department overcrowding and resource utilization. It can also facilitate communication and cooperation. Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation When complementing physical therapy and rehabilitation, virtual care can enhance personalized programs and real-time feedback. This facilitates greater accuracy, better resource-allocation, employee satisfaction and motivation, along with overall patient experience. Why Implement Virtual Care? Optimized Time and Cost Digitizing processes allows organizations to optimize resource allocation (time, budgets) across departments. Remote consultations and follow-ups, as well as other modern features significantly minimize waiting times and facilitate overall efficiency, which enables smarter utilization. Digital health can provide the following. Optimized workflow efficiency (automated documentation and record-keeping, task assignment, prescription generation and management, referral management) Minimized waiting times (automated scheduling, managed queues, notifications, reminders) Accelerated administration (patient registration and consent, insurance verification, claims processing) Streamlined reach (online scheduling and registration, remote check-in, secure channels for protected patient-doctor interaction) Data-Driven Decision-Making Adopting innovation helps organizations to automate day-to-day processes (eg. data manipulation). Personalized programs, trend identification, demand prediction, and other important factors contribute to better informed decision-making. Digital health might enable data-driven decision-making by utilizing the following. EHR and EMR systems. For example: EHR systems for medical practice management EMR systems for accurate medical imaging Integrated solutions. For example: CV for medical imaging CV for blood recognition and analysis How We Can Help Virtual healthcare was implemented even before coronavirus lockdowns had changed healthcare delivery. However, today, following the coronavirus pandemic, which transformed business operations across industries, especially the healthcare industry, virtual care has become more important. Virtual healthcare has shifted primary and secondary care, nursing care, outpatient care, ambulatory services, urgent and emergency services, and other healthcare-related segments. Abto Software, an outsourcing company, delivers value-added healthcare products to empower business leaders. By leveraging domain-specific expertise and innovation — artificial intelligence, computer vision, for example — our teams transform operations, boosting performance. Below is a list of Abto Software’s healthcare expertise. AI based pose estimation for remote physical therapy — movement analysis for telerehabilitation CV-enabled jump recognition and analysis — sensorless human motion detection CV-supported self-diagnosis application — markerless human pose detection CV-based application for precise blood recognition and analysis Computer vision to drive medical imaging Computer vision to empower fall detection for video analytics platform