Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Virtual Nurses and AI Join the Patient Care Team
By Ron Gaboury, CEO, Caregility
Virtual care has been a driving force in transforming patient engagement in recent years, revolutionizing how we deliver healthcare services. Although telehealth’s role in supporting patient access to care between scheduled appointments is undeniable, it is within inpatient settings, such as hospitals and post-acute care settings, that we see virtual care’s most unconventional and profound impact taking shape.
Looking ahead to 2024, we anticipate the rise of AI-enhanced virtual care at every patient’s bedside. Telehealth’s use in acute care environments is introducing new hybrid care models that combine floor teams, remote clinicians, and AI capabilities to enhance clinical insights, reduce gaps in care, and improve patient safety. Leveraging embedded audio, video, and even radar-based AI sensors, intelligent telehealth technologies are uniquely positioned to help care teams elevate patient care, especially as chronic workforce shortages persist.
Here are some key trends and predictions for 2024 that illustrate how bedside hybrid care and health AI will help clinical teams reimagine patient care delivery:
Enhanced Patient Communication and Education
Patients will be empowered to engage with their care teams through audio and video interfaces at the bedside, facilitating real-time communication and education throughout inpatient stays. This enhances the patient experience and can directly impact Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores related to patient communication. Hospitals that perform well on HCAHPS and other quality measures can receive higher Medicare reimbursement rates, while those with lower scores may see reduced payments. Research shows that improved patient communication leads to reduced readmissions and shorter lengths of stay, ultimately benefiting both patients and providers.
Bedside virtual engagement will also enable patients and care teams to involve family members and at-home caregivers in the care planning process more easily, which can significantly reduce patient anxiety and shorten recovery times. This will play an increasingly important role in senior care coordination for families as the U.S. population continues to skew older.
Virtual Bedside Support for Care Teams
Bedside virtual care will introduce new support mechanisms for healthcare teams, creating a secondary line of clinical defense. This reinforcement will help reduce distractions and decrease burnout for overburdened floor teams. It will also offer the current wave of new, less experienced nurses entering the healthcare field virtual access to training and guidance at the point of care.
Virtual bedside support will further address long-standing workforce shortages by enabling innovative care models, such as Virtual Consults, Remote Patient Observation, and Virtual Nursing. These programs will bring remote clinicians into inpatient care processes regardless of geographic boundaries, reducing health system reliance on high-cost travel and contract workers.
AI-Powered Clinical Environments
The same telehealth infrastructure that supports remote clinician access and collaboration at the bedside will also bring AI capabilities into clinical environments. In 2024, AI applications in healthcare will extend beyond operations and find new use cases in patient care delivery. For instance, computer vision AI can be used in video-based patient and room observation to alert care teams to potential safety risks. Ambient intelligence can analyze audio feeds to support automated documentation. Radar-based AI will continuously capture vital sign data for patient trend analysis, expediting clinical interventions when changes in patient care metrics are detected.
These tools will augment – not replace – care teams, offering staff new digital health tools that unlock additional clinical insights. This will lay the groundwork for more personalized benchmark tracking and earlier intervention without introducing nuisance alarms.
Virtual and In-Person Clinical Workflow Enablement
2024 will serve as a pivotal year for vetting new hybrid care models and AI enhancements in care settings. Intelligent telehealth tools will augment the important work of clinicians, creating new care delivery modalities that benefit patients, care teams, and healthcare stakeholders alike. AI-enhanced hybrid care also sets the stage for emerging home-based care delivery models, envisioning a future where virtual nurses, alongside bedside clinicians, are empowered by intelligent tools to deliver high-quality patient care directly in patients’ homes.
As we step into 2024, we envision these predictions becoming a reality in the healthcare landscape. The integration of telehealth and AI technologies promises to usher in a new era of patient-centric care, improved clinician experience, and enhanced operational efficiency. These solutions not only address current workforce challenges but will also help redefine the art of what’s possible with digital health.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As CEO of Yorktel, Caregility’s predecessor company, Ron helped establish the firm’s leading position in the videoconferencing market. Under Ron’s leadership, Yorktel began developing a completely new video communications platform created for the healthcare industry, spanning both software and purpose-built point-of-care devices, all designed specifically for the unique requirements of patient care.
Building on this success, in 2019, Caregility was formed to further advance the development of the Caregility Cloud virtual care platform and product line. Ron remains CEO of both Yorktel and Caregility.
In this capacity, Ron provides strategic guidance and is responsible for acquisitions, investments, and overall business expansion.
