Blueprint for Sustainable Virtual Care: 3 Tactics to Drive Long-Term Success

Virtual care is no longer a luxury — it’s the foundation of modern healthcare delivery. Recent surveys reveal that at least 2 out of 3 patients now expect their healthcare providers to offer digital options — or risk losing them to competitors.

With the rise of digital health disruptors like Ro, BetterHelp or Amazon Clinic, traditional healthcare leaders must get serious about ensuring virtual care’s sustainability. The stakes are high: without a robust virtual care strategy, organizations risk losing patients to these fast-moving innovators.

However, meeting this growing demand requires more than simply adopting virtual care; it demands a strategic, financial, and clinical framework to ensure its long-term success. To build a truly sustainable virtual care program, healthcare organizations must focus on three key areas:

• Strategic sustainability
• Financial sustainability
• Clinical sustainability

The Necessity of Virtual Care

Before Covid-19, telehealth (a.k.a., virtual care) was often viewed as a niche solution, primarily used to provide specialty care in rural areas. Early adopters in the 1990s and 2000s, like the University of Virginia, laid the groundwork for connecting patients to subspecialists at a distance.

The Covid-19 health crisis transformed these perceptions, revealing how much of today’s care delivery can occur without physical interaction. However, many clinicians — especially in primary care — faced challenges during the pandemic due to rushed rollouts, lack of clinician training, and inadequate patient preparation, such as Telehealth TechChecks. These missteps reinforced the notion of telehealth as a stopgap measure rather than a lasting solution.

Strategically Sustainable Virtual Care

Achieving sustainable virtual care starts with a leadership mindset shift. As the saying goes, “What got you here, won’t get you there.” Virtual care isn’t just a clinical tool — it’s a strategic asset with transformative potential.

Here are just a few ways virtual care can create strategic success:

• Attract and retain patients seeking convenience and comfort without sacrificing trusted relationships with their providers.
• Attract and engage innovative clinicians and staff who view digital health and virtual care as vital to their career growth.
• Expand your organization’s reach into underserved areas, reducing travel and becoming a better steward of community resources.
• Increase patient engagement through frequent touchpoints, improving care plan adherence and outcomes.
• Fill scheduling gaps, reduce no-shows, and expand patient panels to boost your bottom line.
• In inpatient settings, enhance care team capabilities to manage more complex cases and sicker patients.

Ultimately, optimizing, growing, and expanding virtual care requires leadership commitment. As with any transformative initiative, change starts at the top. By aligning leadership and strategy, organizations can position themselves to thrive in the rapidly evolving world of virtual care.

Clinically Sustainable Virtual Care

Leadership commitment to virtual care must extend beyond the executive suite. Clinical buy-in is essential — after all, healthcare organizations are in the business of delivering care, and clinicians are the cornerstone of that mission.

The challenges of clinician engagement often stem from the rocky rollout of telehealth during Covid-19. For many organizations, the approach was: “Here’s a webcam and a Zoom license. Now go do telehealth.” This haphazard implementation clashed with clinicians' evidence-driven, patient-centered training. Poor video and audio quality, coupled with a lack of preparation for both clinicians and patients, left many frustrated and reverting to phone calls.

Clinicians are trained to project confidence and control, particularly in front of patients. Yet, telehealth during Covid stripped away the familiar exam room, the structured rooming process, and the ability to rely on physical cues for diagnosis. It’s no wonder many struggled to embrace this new modality.

Achieving clinical sustainability requires overcoming these early setbacks through intentional design, robust training, and clear communication about virtual care’s capabilities and limitations. Engaging clinical leadership and key influencers is critical to fostering acceptance and driving success.

For example, one rural community health center implemented in-house clinical guidelines for same-day telehealth appointments, prioritizing patients with transportation challenges. This initiative immediately improved care access, demonstrating the potential of structured telehealth integration.

Clinicians worldwide have proven that telehealth works in virtually every specialty. Leading health systems have flourishing programs. It’s time for all organizations across the spectrum to catch up and implement what’s already been shown to succeed.

Five Essential Tactics to Achieve Clinical Sustainability:

1. Assign Clinical Leadership: Promote virtual care as a core alternative, not a secondary, subpar option.
2. Develop Clear Clinical Guidelines: Collaboratively define when virtual care is appropriate and when it isn’t to ensure high-quality care.
3. Create Optimized Workflows: Align virtual care workflows with clinical efficiency, addressing technical issues, rooming processes, and post-visit tasks, just as in-person care does.
4. Provide Clinician-Optimized Training: Provide structured training on website manners, technology use, and conducting/documenting virtual exams effectively.
5. Establish Operational and Technical Support: Offer qualified, dedicated staff to resolve technical issues and continually streamline clinician experiences.

Financially Sustainable Virtual Care

The final pillar of virtual care sustainability — and often the first one on everyone’s mind — is ensuring its financial viability.

While many hope for a future with outcome-based, capitated payment models, the reality of today’s fee-for-service environment remains complex. In an ideal world, the focus would shift entirely to patient engagement and outcomes. Whether through a quick video chat, a secure message, or a glance at a patient’s glucose data, multiple virtual care modalities would be seamlessly integrated without financial barriers.

However, in today’s fee-for-service reality, virtual care’s financial sustainability hinges on understanding reimbursement structures. Contrary to common belief, video visits are reimbursed at parity with in-person visits for Medicare, Medicaid (in most states), and commercial insurance in many of the 40+ states with parity laws. Remote physiological monitoring services also provide sufficient reimbursement to cover costs and staff time under normal circumstances.

Challenges remain, particularly for audio-only visits, which are reimbursed at significantly lower rates, reducing their financial appeal. Similarly, Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and Rural Health Clinics face “video visit payment discrimination,” though improvements are anticipated in the coming years.

Despite these hurdles, a virtual care visit is almost always better than no visit from a financial standpoint. And implementing strategies to convert no-shows and cancellations into virtual visits, as we’ve done for numerous clients, can add significant revenue and improve access.

Virtual care is thus already a practical tool for improving outcomes and reducing costs. As organizations take on more value-based contracts, virtual care can directly support key goals, such as enhancing patient engagement, reducing hospital readmissions, and managing chronic conditions more efficiently. These tangible benefits make virtual care a critical component of a financially sustainable future.

A Blueprint towards Virtual Care Sustainability

So where should an organization start? Here are a few resources to get you started:

1. Assess your organization’s telehealth maturity. This framework that we developed pre-2020 will help to identify your organization’s blind spots and opportunities for improvement.
2. Armed with insights about your blind spots, run your organization’s virtual care services program through a systematic optimization that includes well-defined workflows, staff & clinician training, and a support structure. You cannot expect to expand and grow your virtual care services from a shaky foundation.
3. Review your organization’s virtual care strategy. Do you have one in place? Is it any good? A strategy is key to build buy in and commitment from your clinicians and your staff.

Take Stock, Take Aim, Take Action

Virtual care isn’t just a technology or a passing trend — it’s the future of healthcare delivery. Success depends on building a sustainable, well-optimized program that meets the needs of both patients and clinicians.

While optimizing virtual care isn’t rocket science, it does require a multidisciplinary approach. Success depends on expertise in change management, strategic planning, workflow design, clinician training, policy development, technology implementation, and reimbursement strategies.

If your organization lacks this expertise internally, securing external support is essential. Partnering with virtual care specialists, like the Ingenium Team or other consulting firms, ensures you’re equipped to compete and thrive. The competition isn’t waiting to innovate, and neither should you.

Let’s work together to ensure your virtual care program not only survives but thrives. Schedule a call with Christian to explore how our training, coaching, advisory, and consulting services can drive measurable results for your organization.

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Christian Milaster and his team launch, expand, and grow Telehealth Programs for rural health centers, behavioral health agencies, health systems, schools, and libraries. Christian is the Founder and CEO of Ingenium Digital Health Advisors where his team and consortium of experts partner with healthcare leaders to enable the delivery of extraordinary care by accelerating the adoption of digital health innovation.

To explore how we can help your organization solve your challenges, contact Christian by phone or text at 657-464-3648, via email, or video chat.