Virtual care works best when it is part of the hospital’s everyday operations, not a separate program running alongside them.
That was a central theme of a recent AvaSure webinar, “From Smart Rooms to Smart Flow: Designing Virtual Care for Access and Capacity”. The conversation brought together clinical and operational leaders to discuss how health systems can use virtual care to support bedside teams, improve patient flow, and respond to ongoing staffing pressures.
Equum Medical Chief Medical Officer Mario Fusaro, MD, joined Lisbeth Votrubara, Dr. Stephanie Lahr of Vital Thread Advisory, Dr. Mohamed Bakr of Envision Physician Services and Hackensack Meridian Health, and Leslie Ferrell of Harris Health for the discussion.
The panel looked beyond the idea of a “smart room” as a collection of cameras, sensors, virtual platforms, and connected devices. The more important question is how those tools fit into the way care teams work. Technology should give nurses and physicians more support at the bedside, help teams spot concerns earlier, and make it easier to bring the right clinical expertise into the room when it is needed.
Dr. Fusaro discussed virtual care as a way to reduce friction for providers and extend the reach of clinical teams. When virtual resources are built into hospital workflows, they can help support patient observation, escalation, specialty coverage, and care coordination without asking local teams to carry the full burden alone.
The conversation also addressed the operational side of virtual care. Hospitals often track staffing, cost, and utilization, but the panel encouraged leaders to look at measures that show how virtual programs affect daily operations. Those measures can include virtual observation hours, response and escalation times, reduced reliance on one-to-one in-person observation, safety events, length of stay, and readmissions.
For hospitals working to improve capacity, patient flow is closely tied to clinical access. A delay in getting the right clinician involved can affect the emergency department, inpatient units, and ICU operations. Virtual care can help hospitals bring in additional clinical support while keeping patients closer to home whenever appropriate.
The panel also made an important distinction: virtual care is meant to support clinicians, not replace them. The human relationship between patients and their care teams remains central. Virtual resources can help protect that time by taking on parts of observation, communication, coordination, and clinical coverage that would otherwise add to an already demanding workload.
At Equum Medical, we see virtual care as a practical extension of the local hospital team. Our physician-led programs are designed around the needs of each health system, whether that means virtual nursing, hospital medicine, critical care, specialty consultation, or another area where access and capacity are under strain.
The discussion examined how integrated virtual care strategies can help health systems:
- Reduce bottlenecks and improve patient throughput
- Extend clinical capacity and better align workforce with demand
- Connect technology, operations, and clinical workflows
- Support local care retention and enterprise-wide scalability
- Build more sustainable virtual care models beyond fragmented point solutions
Watch the recording to hear how health systems are approaching the architectural, workflow, staffing, and investment decisions needed to turn virtual care infrastructure into measurable gains in access and capacity.
Speakers:
- Mohamed M. Bakr, MD, MBA, FACP, CPE, Vice President Hospital Medicine – Hackensack Meridian Health
- Mario Fusaro, MD, Chief Medical Officer – Equum Medical
- Leslie Ferrell, MHA, Administrative Director of Virtual Care – Harris Health
- Stephanie Lahr, MD, CHCIO, FACHDM, Founder, Vital Thread Advisory
- Lisbeth Votruba, MSN, RN, FAONL, CAVRN, Chief Clinical Officer – AvaSure
Presented by:
Watch the Webinar Recording
