Exploring the Future of Virtual Care in Hospitals: Challenges and Opportunities
The future of virtual care in hospitals is shaped by a mix of longstanding and evolving challenges. As the American Hospital Association notes, hospitals face financial pressures due to rising patient acuity, staffing shortages, and increasing labor costs—trends intensified by an aging population. These challenges aren’t entirely new, but their scale is unprecedented, making it critical for hospitals to adapt. Virtual care, telehealth, and AI offer promising ways to enhance patient care and manage resources more effectively, positioning hospitals to meet both current demands and future growth.
Listen to Narinder Singh and Eric Yablonka explore the challenges and opportunities for the future of virtual care in hospitals.
Video Transcript
Narinder Singh:
We are here to talk about the future of virtual care in hospitals specifically. I know that you’ve got a lot of experience in healthcare. I think hospitals are a little bit more of an unknown and one of the reasons I’m excited to speak to you is because you’ve got a vast experience, but you’re no longer in the day-to-day. You’ve got a little bit of a chance to look at the bigger picture of change. And before I zoom and dive into this future of virtual care, I want to zoom out for a second to that bigger picture. This is a quote from the American Hospital Association. The financial stability of America’s hospitals is increasingly at risk due to rising patient acuity, staffing shortages and escalating costs for labor. We know population’s aging from 2010 to 20, the population over 65 grew five times faster than any other segment, which is the fastest rate we’ve had in a hundred years. So we know that there’s problems there. We know that there’s going to be capacity issues. Do you think this is new or would this have been the same things we would’ve talked about 10 years ago or do you think there’s something new and different happening now?