Solve for Access, Engagement and Outcomes with Virtual Care Delivery

When it comes to giving patients the highest quality of care, healthcare organizations have no shortage of obstacles. Whether it’s access to care, resource management, or patient engagement, there are a number of complex goals they need to achieve in order to provide the best patient experience and clinical outcomes. Virtual care delivery has emerged as a promising solution, enabling organizations to overcome these obstacles more effectively by providing flexible, patient-centered care options.

Complicating matters is that each of these challenges influence each other, creating a sticky web of interconnected problems. If you pull on the wrong thread to address clinical capacity, you might find your ability to invest resources comes up short elsewhere. If you pull back on resource management too much, patient experience could suffer. And if you’re not careful, it can lead to a vicious circle that could threaten to unravel your entire organization!

Sounds daunting? Well it can be, if you don’t have a good game plan in place. But the right solution will tackle all of these problems to create a healthier ecosystem for patients, clinicians, and your organization. Let’s take a closer look at each of these potential problems, and how digital care can help foster a healthier ecosystem for years to come.

Patient Access to Care

The first issue is a matter of access—it goes without saying that if you can’t interact with your patients, you’re going to have a hard time helping them get better! But in today’s modern world, it’s not so simple. For better or for worse, patients are no longer walking in through a physical door three times a week for rehab sessions. Instead, they want greater flexibility in how they access care. 

To meet patients where they are—while minimizing costs and optimizing quality of care—organizations can create a layer of digital technology that spans the patient journey. Tools for virtual care delivery, such as visits, remote monitoring, patient messaging, and patient portals provide new opportunities for engagement that help bridge the gap to our patients in a way that aligns with today’s busy lifestyles.

Virtual care consultations can be offered as a standalone option or as a supplement to in-person care, making it ideal for low-risk interventions as well as check-ins along the way. Patient Portals help make it a two-way interaction, providing a way for patients to reach their clinician for questions or concerns. This can help patients overcome common physical barriers like transportation, time constraints like busy work schedules, and family obligations like arranging child care. It’s also a game changer for rural patients, as digital tools can help to address provider shortages in those areas where there are fewer services available to patients requiring longer travel times to get needed care.

By using virtual care delivery to expand treatment options, you can continue to treat, engage, and inform patients even when they aren’t able to physically make it for an in-person session. Virtual care delivery not only enhances accessibility but also provides a scalable solution to meet patient needs across diverse locations and circumstances. Without the flexibility that this layer of technology provides, those common barriers to care can easily turn into a snowball of cancellations or no-shows that can postpone care for weeks, months, and even years. And with the time saved from this increased efficiency, clinicians can see more patients or spend more hands-on time with higher acuity patients who need the most care.

Cost of Care and Resource Management

Next, let’s look at another couple of issues that share a connection—total cost of care and resource management. To illustrate this, we’ll turn to one of the most prevalent conditions requiring therapeutic intervention: musculoskeletal care. More than 50 percent of adults over 18 (124 million!) have reported a musculoskeletal condition, with that rate climbing to nearly 75 percent for adults ages 65 and over.¹

This massive population size creates a couple of equally large problems. One, a lot of MSK patients aren’t being sent to the right place for care the first time around. Many low-acuity MSK patients get sent to costlier care paths like a primary care physician, imaging, or specialty services when they would have been better served by a therapy-first intervention. 

This process is not only more costly for the patient and the health system, but it also clogs up wait times for higher-acuity patients who would greatly benefit from these services—which leads to higher costs and lack of access (and then we’re stuck back in that interconnected web!). While these specialty services are extremely important, they aren’t needed for everyone—but many patients are still being directed there using a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to MSK triage.

So the answer must be therapy-first, right? Well yes, but it’s not so simple. Therapy-first interventions have been shown to have significantly better outcomes, but therapy has a capacity issue. Even if we did move all the patients to a therapy-first model, the system couldn’t handle it and we’d be back to square one. There is, however, a way to make PT-first work: hybrid care and digital care pathways.

Organizations can drive a PT-first approach with digital care tools such as home exercise programs, patient education, patient mobile apps, telehealth, and remote therapeutic monitoring (RTM). With this approach, patients are screened for red flags first. Candidates for physical therapy are then directed to virtual therapy or an in-person visit, and higher-acuity patients can be referred to specialty services that are more appropriate for them.

There’s strong evidence for this type of care model, with benefits ranging from shorter episodes of care to lower costs. Studies have shown that patients engaging in PT-first care have an 89 percent lower probability of receiving an opioid prescription, a 28 percent lower probability of advanced imaging, and a 15 percent lower probability of an emergency department visit.²

This system puts less burden on individual clinicians through better triaging and self-guided programs, allowing clinicians to not only see more patients, but to make therapy more available to all. And because organizations can be reimbursed through RTM, it puts less stress on the organization’s limited resources.

Patient Engagement and Experience

Patients want digital care—80 percent of patients want to interact with their healthcare providers using a smartphone.³ But it’s not that patients no longer value in-person care; on the contrary—they want connection and engagement. Virtual care delivery plays a crucial role here, offering an accessible and convenient way for patients to connect with their providers. We’re living in an era of the empowered consumer, where the convenience of our mobile devices powers many of our daily activities. 

We can order groceries or book a rideshare to the airport, but healthcare patients are not receiving a similar modern, convenient consumer experience like they’ve come to expect from nearly every other part of their daily life. And when you’re in pain after going through a significant health event, like persistent shoulder pain or recovery from an MSK surgery, you want to feel that connection today—not three or four weeks from now. How good is your patient experience going to feel when you can have groceries on your doorstep in an hour, but can’t receive guidance about shoulder pain within a week?

Virtual care deliveries, such as consultations and patient portals, can address the initial access portion of this issue, but what about continued engagement over time? One of the most effective ways to cultivate patient engagement is through effective digital home exercise programs and online patient education.

An effective HEP platform helps keep patients engaged—and provides important care continuity when patients cannot make an in-person visit, or when a visit is unnecessary. It’s also effective at boosting patient progress between visits while reducing the cost and time commitment of supervised therapy sessions for providers. This helps patients stay on track with their care plan, and provides flexibility to their exercise regimen, making it easier for them to fit it into their busy schedule.

Patient education not only provides the context patients need to understand their condition, but it also prepares them for each step in their journey. And with an online, on-demand model, patients can come to each appointment with a more thorough understanding of their condition. The visit can then be spent on providing treatment, discussing care plans, or answering patient questions.

Of course the clinician also has an important role to play in improving patient engagement and their overall experience, and that’s where patient monitoring and adherence tracking comes in. If your patients aren’t adhering to their treatment plans, they aren’t going to get better. Digital patient adherence tracking not only helps flag questions or concerns like pain and difficulty with prescribed HEP before a larger problem arises, it also provides a structure of accountability. Because the clinician has more visibility, it’s easier to not only set expectations for the patient, but also provide the support they need to see their program through, mitigating cancellations and dips in patient progress that can lead to negative outcomes.

And the beauty of a digital ecosystem is that RTM can then be incorporated with the aforementioned digital health tools to improve patient adherence and engagement and collect better data, all while adding an additional revenue stream!

So what would this digital healthcare ecosystem of the future look like? It looks like Medbridge Pathways.

Introducing Medbridge Pathways

Medbridge Pathways is our new digital care platform, purpose-built to keep therapy at the forefront of care and help organizations deliver superior patient outcomes across the musculoskeletal care spectrum. By supplementing existing in-person programs with a variety of digital care pathways based on patient acuity, Pathways provides a solution that engages the patient with therapy-driven care that incorporates their condition and lifestyle, and delivers that valuable data back into the clinician’s hands so they can leverage their expertise. This approach to virtual care delivery ensures a comprehensive care experience that adapts to patient needs while optimizing clinical workflows.

This experience guides patients through their journey to help them feel better, move better, and live better. 

• Programs are personalized by an onboarding questionnaire that takes into account patients’ pain, goals, and activity levels.
• Patients are guided through exercises by evidence-based progression criteria in multiple phases.
• Engaging video, text, and interactive education are incorporated to provide a guide for the patient, supporting them throughout their rehab journey.
• Patients are motivated to complete the program through a combination of gamification and data-driven progress tracking.
• Periodic surveys and PROs are collected to help measure progress, identify red flags, and manage progression. 

Medbridge Pathways won’t disrupt the clinician-patient relationship; instead, it empowers providers to keep patients in their ecosystem for a lifetime of care. Providers can supplement brick-and-mortar care with a cutting-edge, digitally-enabled therapy platform that provides patients a modern, convenient care experience, improves health outcomes, and allows higher care capacity while reducing the provider workload.

Medbridge Pathways is now in beta testing, and will open to early adopters in 2024. Request a demo to find out how you can join the digitally-enabled future of MSK care: provider-first, therapy-driven care for patients across the care continuum.