The UK has now reached a record 6million people waiting for elective care since January 2020.
With the waiting list numbers continuing to rise, it should come as no surprise that we are seeing more and more individuals demand digital and remote solutions which enable personalised, quality care, reduces long waiting times, unnecessary travel, and the risk of infection.
As patients across the UK require new ways of managing their illness or condition, and healthcare organisations are struggling to keep up with the elective backlog, we’re seeing the emergence of virtual care platforms.
The market for virtual care platforms has exploded in the last few years, seeing high growth rates being driven by patient’s request for easily accessible care. Companies dominating the market share can be found in Sweden, UK, and France with the majority of product capabilities typically covering both triage, telehealth, and advanced booking features.
At Visiba Care, we believe that digital services such as virtual care platforms possess the ability to make a greater contribution to solving the key challenges in health and social care today. Helping to improve the system at every stage along the patient and service users’ journey, improving flow, optimising care, and providing more responsive and integrated services.
When implemented correctly, a virtual care platform can not only support elective recovery but is also able to help build primary care capacity and enable the integration of healthcare.
Triaging elective waiting lists is critical for patients, as patients currently wait for increasingly long amounts of time receiving little or no support until their first outpatient appointment. During this time, conditions have the potential to deteriorate. Here, virtual care platforms have the potential to triage non-urgent patients off the waiting list into services more suitable to manage their conditions, while providing additional support to those patients who need to remain on the waiting list and therefore reducing their rate of deterioration while they wait.
Additionally, a virtual care platform can help to build primary care capacity, with remote consultations proven to free up GP’s time. By offering the ability of remote working, an organisation can battle the effects of staff burnout and improve workplace well-being and staff retention. This can in turn help to reduce the administration burden and allow clinicians to work at the top of their skillset when implemented effectively. Through automated medical history and triage, we can achieve improved demand management and better resource allocation.
Furthermore, virtual care platforms can enable better integration of services, bringing together all relevant clinicians across all sectors at a single time across multiple locations, shortcutting decision-making time and reducing wasted staff time. Digital services like Visiba Care remove the geographic constraints often associated with traditional face-to-face services, helping to improve health equality and equity of access.
While there has been plenty of debate over the last year regarding digital services versus face-to-face GP appointments, we believe that digital health technology should not replace but rather extend the health and social care services that a health organisation provides its patients. Digital transformation is inevitable for healthcare organisations wishing to continue providing high-quality care for patients, manage increasing demand and supporting clinicians.
As the preferred and most trusted virtual care platform in the Nordics for more than a decade with an office now set up in London, it is our belief that physical and digital health solutions should be joined side-by-side as part of modern-day healthcare. Visiba Care’s virtual care platform enables work across all health systems, spanning into primary, secondary, mental health and integrated care, supporting more than 7 million patients with digital access to health and social care services.
Through a variety of user-friendly and intuitive tools, including a white label patient portal, intuitive web interface, patient or clinical-managed bookings, online consultations, and powerful AI triage; Visiba Care’s platform has all the functionalities to grow as an organisations digital maturity evolves and systems develop.
Visiba Care’s experience has taught us that every healthcare organisation’s digital transformation journey is unique, as every organisation has varying needs and starting points. That’s why our sustainable and scalable virtual care platform invests into supporting staff and delivering efficiencies in clinical pathways.
It has been an extremely difficult few years for the NHS with Covid-19 and the changing patient demands for personalised, easy to access healthcare, and an elective backlog that will take considerable time to break down. Therefore, the coming together of a digital-physical approach is critical for improvement and will undoubtably help to lead a system-wide push for integration and innovation.
To learn more about our thoughts on the future of virtual care platforms and our solutions, please contact Marc Humphrey at marc.humphrey@visibacare.com.
Photographer: Anna Sigvardsson ©2022 Visiba Group AB