Finding the Right Balance of ‘Consolidation’ in Virtual Care

The healthcare industry has a love-hate relationship with consolidation. Consolidation can improve efficiency, increase profits, and simplify patient experiences, but it can also result in frustrating bureaucracy, a lack of personalization, and worrisome market monopolies.
 
Every member of the care continuum, from care providers and health plans to technology companies, goes through the tug-of-war of consolidation. It isn’t easy to find the balance point where patients have enough high-quality choices that offer acceptable experiences without being overwhelmed by the sheer variety of options.
 
Virtual care is in the midst of this struggle right now. As a relatively new segment, there are enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs and care providers to experiment with innovative technologies and care strategies. The proliferation of devices and modalities is good for patients who are interested in creating custom experiences – and the fluidity of the marketplace means that every patient voting with their wallet can have a tangible impact on which companies stay and go.
 
At the same time, too many cooks in the kitchen creates challenges on the back end. Digital integration is still challenging for the majority of healthcare systems, and care coordination can suffer when data streams are not appropriately integrated into core health IT platforms.  Healthcare organizations may not have the resources to patch in dozens of different devices or partner with multiple virtual care companies to keep on top of patient needs.
 
The key to reaching equilibrium is to develop an environment where care is intelligently coordinated through a platform-driven approach that leaves ample room for personalized interactions, continued innovation, and high-value partnerships with innovators that measurably enhance experiences and outcomes.

Consolidation as a Driver of More Comprehensive, Proactive Care

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the rise of telehealth, virtual care modalities were starting to come into vogue. The ubiquity of smartphones, growing Bluetooth and broadband availability, and increasing demand from patients sparked a dozen new buzzwords: virtual care, RPM, telehealth, telemedicine, digital health and more.
 
With the worst of the health crisis behind us – and with the valuable lessons learned from rapidly scaling up digital care strategies – we are starting to see some consensus around what virtual care means and how to best deploy it in the real-world setting.
 
We are seeing the market prioritize specific features, such as usability, accessibility, standards-based integration, and ROI for patients, payers and providers. The result is focused consensus around what virtual care needs to thrive, particularly as demographics shift and digital natives start to age into higher risk categories for chronic disease.
 
This type of consolidation is highly desirable and must continue. It benefits providers by encouraging the development of holistic, coordinated platforms that adhere to best practices in virtual care delivery; it benefits patients by creating tailorable yet scalable experiences to help them manage their own health; and it benefits payers by reducing overall costs of care through more proactive care and fewer expensive, crisis events.

Building Seamless Infrastructure to Enable Coordinated Virtual Care

As the industry zeros in on its goals, stakeholders can start to look toward the technologies that enable providers to build strong, sustainable relationships with individual patients, particularly between visits. 
 
This requires an integrated and interoperable infrastructure to ingest data from apps and devices; synthesize that input into a meaningful, timely story about a patient’s activities; and empower care providers to take necessary actions to support better outcomes.
 
The most effective technologies are the most invisible: the ones that seamlessly enable providers to complete important tasks without becoming their own burden.
 
Once again, consolidation becomes a plus. Providers and payers are more likely to achieve their care goals with a cohesive platform that brings out the best in home-based digital devices, patient-facing apps, and other technologies. 
 
Without the appropriate digital foundation, providers and health plans risk gaps in their knowledge and lost opportunities to intervene proactively with patients. As standards like FHIR become even more mature, it will become easier for providers and payers to adopt a consolidated approach to virtual care coordination and maximize the potential of digital tools for patient management.

Staying Ahead of the Evolution of Virtual Care

Making the most of this trend toward a better aligned virtual care environment will be challenging for providers and health plans. Stakeholders will need to focus on coordination and integration without tipping over into the negative side of consolidation, which could limit their ability to remain innovative and agile.
 
It will be important for providers and payers to clearly define their virtual care goals, deeply understand their populations, and map out their digital strengths and weaknesses so they can make smart decisions about adopting new care methodologies and technologies.
 
These decisions should take into account that patient needs change quickly, but organizations tend to suffer from inertia. Choosing partners that can support ongoing improvements and help keep pace with evolving device technologies, data standards, and care strategies will be essential for success.
 
As the virtual care ecosystem works its way through the push and pull of consolidation, providers and payers need to remember that there are benefits as well as drawbacks to coalescing around a smaller number of market leaders. Focusing on developing more comprehensive, coordinated, and integrated care strategies can help stakeholders maximize the value of virtual care and offer higher quality care to patients in need.
 

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As CEO of Carium, a virtual care company, Rich Steinle brings nearly 30 years of healthcare leadership experience spanning primary care delivery, integrated physician networks, electronic health records and collaborative medical real estate solutions. Prior to joining Carium, Steinle served as founding member, president and CEO of Innovista Health Solutions, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Health Care Service Corporation. Steinle holds degrees in Economics and Management from James Madison University.