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What Is Virtual Care?
Virtual care is a broad term that has come
to encompass all the ways health care providers can interact remotely with patients. We’ve given this burgeoning area of interest many different names, such as telemedicine, telehealth, and remote patient monitoring. But whatever we call it, virtual care allows practitioners to interact with patients at
a distance in real time — such as over the phone, by live video chat, or through instant messaging.
It could include a traditional doctor’s appointment or a consultation with a nutritionist. If you have heart failure, it could be having a scale in your home that lets a cardiologist digitally keep tabs on your weight.
Or, for someone who has diabetes, a primary care provider could keep an eye on their blood sugar with a glucose monitor.
The virtual care trend was fueled by our society’s growing fascination with all things digital. But it was also inspired by our constant quest for ways to provide better, higher-quality health care at a lower cost.
A Brief History of Virtual Care
Over the past decade or so — even before the COVID-19 pandemic — many innovative thinkers in the health care industry began wondering how to enable long-distance care for all patients with all levels of illness.
Considering the Virtues of Virtual Health Care
By Dr. Heidi J. Syropoulos
“Virtual care.” These are two words I am not sure I would have put together years ago. As a physician, I know what caring for patients is, but how could that care be provided virtually? Don’t you have to be with someone to take care of them?
Recently, I typed those two words into a Google search, and there were 1.1 billion results. More than a billion! So it’s safe to say that virtual care is here to stay.
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