U.S. Virtual Care Market to Grow More Than Seven-Fold by 2025

Virtual care in the United States is about to undergo exponential growth over the next four years.

Frost & Sullivan predicts the American virtual care market will surge 40.4 percent annually, thanks largely to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“The largest component of the virtual care market involves the use of telehealth and telemedicine. However, the concept of virtual care presents opportunities that extend beyond telehealth and telemedicine and can improve the management of patients across all healthcare segments,” said Victor Camlek, Healthcare & Life Sciences research manager at Frost & Sullivan. “Virtual care platforms can provide an improved level of efficiency in workflow processes such as test scheduling, results notification, and follow-up patient care management that will be required in the next generation  of healthcare well beyond the pandemic.”

Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, “COVID-19 Pandemic Ignites Enthusiasm for Virtual Care,” finds that virtual care is the next growth opportunity across the healthcare space. Requirements to ensure social distancing have transformed virtual care from an essential innovation to a must-have model. 
 
Camlek added: “This view of full-scale virtual care offers the ability to manage the clinical and operational processes that include electronic health records (EHRs), healthcare workflow, patient relationship management, and many basic functions such as billing and scheduling. Further, it provides a strong return on investment (ROI) for providers and patients based on its ability to save time and utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to enable innovative systems far beyond the simple functions that can be applied today.”
 
The virtual care space presents tremendous growth prospects for its market participants, including:

• Expanded ways to utilize patient-generated health data: This new volume of valuable data will be accompanied by advances in data analytics, new solutions for clinical decision support, and the evolving use case for population health management (PHM).
• The use of technology to manage the increasing prevalence of behavioral health issues that have been reported since the onset of the global pandemic: Virtual care’s benefits are visible as beleaguered mental health professionals seek to remotely manage pandemic-related spikes in conditions such as depression, stress, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and suicidal thoughts.
• Opportunities to ensure dynamic security standards across all elements of virtual care platforms: They must be designed to instill confidence among healthcare stakeholders that the threat to the anticipated surge in online health data can be protected.
• Creation of an end-to-end virtual care solution that fulfills and exceeds the essential capabilities and components of traditional in-person healthcare services: There is a need to increase knowledge among all healthcare stakeholders about the functionality and workflow-related potential of virtual care.
• Development of a virtual care implementation strategy defining the program and benefits offered: Healthcare providers of virtual care solutions must revitalize their infrastructure to manage the supply chain and logistics for their customers with 24/7 support to enable a complete and rewarding virtual care experience.