Virtual care: benefits, challenges, and prospects
Tags: webdev, healthcare, automation, productivity
Published: 2023-12-01 17:05:59

_This post is a quick overview of an Abto Software’s [blog article](https://www.abtosoftware.com/blog/virtual-care-benefits-challenges-prospects)._

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 revealed future-proof opportunities for mature healthcare leaders to facilitate 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.

The currently largest market for implementing virtual health is the United States, in particular North America. The reasons behind include established infrastructure in the healthcare segment, computational technology, and opportune government regulations.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/jdsp2qqhqsopdfvmiro3.jpg)

## Virtual care, its types and purpose

### Virtual care 

– the use of technology to resolve healthcare limitations (for example, 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, secure channels (instant messaging, audio, video), as well as straightforward EHR/EMR access. 

### Remote patient monitoring (RPM)

– the use of applications, medical devices, and other related advancements to assess and tract key indicators (heart rate, blood sugar, sleep, energy, and others).

This practice empowers professionals to overview and analyze health conditions from anywhere and anytime. This way, health indicators, symptoms, allergies, treatment and medication adherence, and other key factors can be easily tracked outside conventional clinical settings.

Remote patient monitoring adoption is used to enable early detection, data-driven diagnosis and treatment, patient motivation and self-management, preventive intervention, and more. 

### Data-driven diagnostics & triage

– the integration of applications that leverage artificial intelligence to meet patient needs more targeted.

Insight-driven diagnostics & triage is performed by using virtual platforms that simplify healthcare assessment. That drives pattern recognition and analysis, informed decision-making, disease prognosis, risk assessment, and other critical processes.

### Data processing & analytics

– the integration of applications, which employ artificial intelligence along with Big Data, with nationwide healthcare databases.

Data processing & 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.

## Efficiently adopted virtual care: Practical applications

### Virtual consultations and follow-ups

By using computer technology, healthcare companies might 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

And leverage increased adherence, reduced no-shows, simplified administration, and greater customer reach.

### Pain management

By adopting modern innovation, healthcare organizations might 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

And enjoy optimized infrastructure, minimized overload and burnout among employees, care continuity, patient satisfaction and loyalty, and, accordingly, higher revenue.

### Emergency services

Speaking about emergency services, virtual care might improve remote triage and interpretation to support accurate diagnosis and treatment, on-site coordination and guidance, and further post-emergency monitoring. This way, medical professionals can facilitate response timer, department overcrowding, resource utilization, as well as communication and cooperation.

### Physical therapy and rehabilitation

When complementing physical therapy and rehabilitation, virtual care might enhance personalized programs, real-time feedback and guidance, exercising guidance and even progress tracking to review patient recovery. This facilitates greater accuracy, better resource-allocation, employee satisfaction and motivations, and overall patient experience.

## Why implement virtual care?

### Optimized time and cost

Digitizing processes allows organizations to optimize resource allocation (time, cost) 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 might provide:

- 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, and more)

### Data-driven decision-making

Adopting innovation helps organizations to automate day-to-day processes, for example, data manipulation. Personalized programs, trend identification, demand prediction, and other important factors are contributing to better informed decision-making. 

Digital health might enable data-driven decision-making by utilizing:

- EHR & EMR systems, for example:
a. EHR systems for medical practice management
b. EMR systems for accurate medical imaging 
- Integrated solutions, for example:
a. CV for medical imaging
b. CV for blood recognition and analysis

## How we can help

Virtual healthcare was implemented even before coronavirus lockdowns have changed healthcare delivery. However, today, after the COVID-19 pandemic, which transformed business operations across industries, including 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, outsourcing company, delivers value-added healthcare products to empower business leaders. By leveraging domain-specific expertise and innovation – artificial intelligence, computer vision, and others – our teams transform operations, boosting performance.

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