Healthcare in the U.S. is a rapidly-shifting, highly demanding industry. From the shift toward value-based care to the quadruple aim to the dense regulatory landscape, health systems are repeatedly faced with thorny issues and complex challenges. Healthcare organizations deploying virtual care meet similar objectives and obstacles, but are doing so without the body of data and benchmarks available for other care delivery channels.
There’s a fair amount of industry research looking at telemedicine or virtual care, but it is primarily patient-focused. While a few look at providers or organizations, those are often focused on satisfaction. Organizations like KLAS, for example, do a great job of rating how companies like us are doing to support health systems. When it comes to actual deployment, modes of care, conditions treated, and other important data, we just don’t have a lot. And that’s a shame because benchmarking is critical to making informed, data-driven decisions.
To help address the lack of industry standard virtual care program success measures and usable data, we launched the 2018 On-Demand Virtual Care Benchmark survey. This study is intended to explore the challenges and opportunities of on-demand virtual care, while gathering valuable data to help health systems and other healthcare organizations measure their virtual care programs against aggregate peer-group data.
Why would health systems want to benchmark their virtual care programs? The benefits of benchmarking are numerous, but we’ve boiled it down to the top three:
Reason 1: Understand the Current State
In his 2001 book Good to Great, business coach, teacher and writer Jim Collins notes that “brutal honesty”is one of the key characteristics of “great” companies. He goes deep into the reasons for this, but the crux of his argument is, you can’t make good decisions without a healthy dose of reality.
Benchmarking can help your health system achieve that level of brutal honesty by generating a clear picture of how your program measures up against industry standards. This gives you insight into things like:
- Gaps, strengths and opportunities
- How your program compares to peers
- Whether you are effectively measuring success
- Current competitive position
- Effectiveness of your current strategy
Reason 2: Be Strategic in Planning and Growth
Visibility is an important part of planning. Objective, independent data about the industry, the current state of your program and how the two align gives you the information and confidence to make sound strategic decisions.
Those gaps? You can develop a roadmap to close them. Strengths? Build a strategy to leverage them. Opportunities? Craft a plan to go after them. Benchmarking also gives you the opportunity to clearly define (or redefine) goals and objectives, develop a standardized process for reporting and effectively monitor performance.
Planning with clear, real-world data is even more beneficial for organizations looking to launch virtual care. You’ll be able to see where gaps and opportunities exist, and set yourself and your on-demand virtual care program up for success from day one.
Reason 3: Performance Improvement
Far and away, the biggest benefit to benchmarking is the ability to improve performance, and gain strategic advantages. Virtual care has proven to be a useful patient acquisition channel, but with more healthcare organizations (and non-traditional competitors like consumer-facing telemedicine companies) offering this service, understanding the market is key to success.
The action plan you can develop from benchmarking takes into account the independent, objective and brutally honest view of the current state, the strategic planning and optimization that comes from it, and prepares your organization to take on the market with a high-performing, patient-satisfying virtual care service.
