Virtual Clinics: Which Attributes Determine Success?
Growth in areas such as big data, cloud, and mobile computing have aided new trends in health care, and one area that has grown significantly is virtual clinics. Health care industry reports suggest that virtual clinics are a trend that will transform health care. Urgent care, retail care, and virtual care are considered the big players in the scope of expected transformations, of which virtual care is expected to grow the most with a 34 percent compound annual growth rate.
With both synchronous and asynchronous communication at play, virtual care serves as a stimulus to improve physician productivity and patient satisfaction. Virtual care is gradually stretching its bounds beyond basic diagnosis into some of the more complex areas, such as handling lung disorders and diabetes. Nations are starting to evaluate virtual care options more closely because of the affordable health care they provide by helping to cut costs and fix deficits faced at the country level.
Virtual care clinics have challenges when scaling up. In order to succeed in the complex world of health care, the need for security tops the list. This includes secure authentication and communication between patients and health care providers as well as safe-guarding patient information. Thanks to the growth in mobile technologies, virtual care has increased in developing nations like India, but preserving security continues to be a challenge.
Given the large scope of virtual clinics and the underlying technologies and systems that support them, it will be difficult for partners to work in isolation. Partnerships and collaboration—even among competitors—will be important to ensure the right research, development, and investments are made to aid growth.
Performance and reliability will become core to the success of these virtual clinics. A patient who is trying to reach a health care provider has an understandable urgency. If the patients have trouble connecting with doctors, whether due to the availability of doctors or problems with the underlying technology, overall trust in the ecosystem will start to fall apart.
Virtual clinics definitely have a promising future in the world of health care and technology. The attributes discussed above will become increasingly important in giving virtual care a positive boost in the future.
