Virtual care enables us to rethink care outside the physical experience. Its expansion holds the potential to reach more vulnerable people and to significantly reduce health inequities. Its success also depends on lessons learned and on scaling in a way that reaches populations through multiple touch points.
In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has acted as a forcing mechanism, causing us to rethink how to accelerate the ways healthcare gets delivered beyond the walls of a physical care setting. When the pandemic began to rage around the world, healthcare leaders quickly realized the full scale of the health emergency.
The most vulnerable among us were its prime targets, which crystallized just how insufficient the brick-andmortar care model is in providing people with broad access to care and how incredibly difficult population health management is to achieve. If organizations were considering implementing virtual care strategies before the pandemic, they were now actually forced to accelerate those efforts.