Evaluating Your Virtual Urgent Care

Has virtual urgent care’s utilization come and gone with the pandemic? Many health systems are currently evaluating their virtual urgent care investments. During the pandemic, providers, patients, and payors rapidly adopted telehealth. At the height of the pandemic, many health systems recorded that between 75-90 percent of their ambulatory visit volume was conducted through telehealth. Virtual urgent care had been evolving prior to the pandemic and continues to be evaluated. Presently, the utilization of telehealth across the country has significantly retracted from pandemic levels. Varying estimates show most health systems with less than 20 percent telehealth utilization. As a result, many health systems are reevaluating their investments in their virtual urgent care.

Health systems are reviewing their pandemic-fueled investments in telehealth. As a result, organizations are asking how their virtual urgent care strategically connects to their network goals. Most organizations recognize that the patient’s ability to schedule seamlessly online is a satisfier and can be a competitive advantage in the market. The digital front door of an organization not only provides digital access to care but also provides the patient with a hint at the quality they will receive. If a patient's user experience is fragmented and clunky, patients may correlate that experience to the quality of care that they receive. As fair or unfair as that may be, patients are accustomed to making that determination in other industries such as banking, shopping, etc.

As a health system evaluates its virtual urgent care, it is vital to consider the user’s experience. A clean virtual urgent care experience gives insight to the patient as to how that health system will navigate other more complex patient care journeys. There are levels to patients' experience, and a health system may need to partner with someone other than their EMR to help deliver a desirable user experience.

As health systems review their virtual urgent care’s connection to the network's strategy, consider if the virtual urgent care offering is its own department with its own staff. The pandemic unveiled many things as most providers shifted to virtual care. There are effective virtualists, and there are others who are less effective. 

A community health network located in central Indiana had nearly 100 providers rotating through the virtual urgent care department at the height of the pandemic. This allowed the system to look for distinctions in provider productivity and patient satisfaction. High-performing virtualists were offered full-time positions within the department. This helps to improve the patient experience and produces repeat users.

Tracking and trending data from your virtual urgent care is vital to understanding the value this department brings. Patient satisfaction, utilization, new patient acquisition to the network, and wait times are just a few data points to track. Sharing these data points helps to support the department’s connection to the organization's strategy. New patient growth is a goal for most health system’s primary care networks. Through data analytics, many health systems can show the value of a new patient acquired from their virtual urgent care by tracking the charges incurred after the initial exposure to the health system.

Where health systems position their virtual urgent care can be the difference between a department competitor and a department producer. As organizations are reimaging their primary care delivery program, they should consider if their on-demand services, such as retail health and convenience care, compete internally with their physicians for productivity. Primary care panels can expand when fewer same-day sick spots are utilized. Positioning this department with an integrated primary care strategy helps to connect new patients to the system and removes internal friction from patients seen through this modality.

Finally, and most importantly, what do patients of the health system think of this service? Health systems should review the number of repeat patients to the number of new patients. A department attracting 35 percent of new patients and seeing 65 percent repeat visits in a month shows good growth and retention. Over time, that percentage may vary.