Historical figures like Sigmund Freud and Elizabeth Blackwell serve as reminders of how fascinating and rich medicine’s history is. Imhotep and Hippocrates were known as “the god of medicine” and “the father of medicine”, respectively, in ancient times when implementing home remedies was the only kind of healthcare practice everyone knew.
Unlike the ancient times, we now can have access to medicines and adequate disease treatment in a matter of minutes. Despite being so developed, the world still has many parts that lack essential health services. Some areas lack adequate healthcare facilities, while others lack qualified healthcare professionals. However, several organizations are working to address this problem.
By providing patients with unrivalled high-quality care regardless of their location, ViTel Net remains one of the leading virtual care providers. It allows clients to improve the health and well-being of individuals and communities by providing cutting-edge technology and services that enable care to be delivered anywhere.
In our search for “The 10 Most Innovative Virtual Care Service Providers,” Insights Care came across ViTel Net.
Please brief our audience about your company, its mission, and the key aspects of its stronghold within the virtual care services niche.
A founding member of the American Telemedicine Association, ViTel Net has been delivering virtual care technology solutions since 1990. Our mission is to ensure that people have access to the care they need to live their healthiest lives, regardless of where they live or other socio-economic factors.
We partner with passionate care-providing organizations and leverage our extensive expertise to configure and integrate solutions that connect to our enterprise cloud virtual care platform in support of programs that match the way our partner delivers care, and their patients want to receive it.
Tell us more about the offerings that give your company a distinctive edge to stand out from the competition.
ViTel Net’s modular virtual care platform, vCareCommand, was designed to make remote care delivery an integrated care modality for both patients and providers. Integrated with the health system’s electronic health records and other health IT infrastructure, ViTel Net can facilitate automated data and medical imaging flow to ensure the remote provider has all the correct information to make good decisions for their patients within the virtual care web portal.
The web app user experience is built upon ViTel Net’s patent-pending workflow platform, enabling rapid application configuration to meet the health system’s workflow specifications, without writing code.
The result is a single platform that supports the entire care continuum with workflows that providers and patients are already familiar with. As an open architecture with an ever-expanding ecosystem of value-added solution partners, vCareCommand offers embedded capabilities like on-demand language interpretation, comprehensive remote physical examination device, an empathetic AI chatbot, ePrescribe functionality, eCommerce functionality, and advanced analytics and reporting for service line management.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, what challenges did you face, and how did you overcome them while ensuring the safety of your employees.
ViTel Net’s business continuity plan included outfitting all employees with the equipment and services to be able to work remotely, so when COVID-19 shut office environments down, ViTel Net didn’t miss a beat.
Where we did get hurt was disruption to our pipeline of providers to provide virtual care programs for the second quarter of 2020. All major health systems put all such programs on hold as they scrambled to address an overnight change from 10% to 80% of all patient visits being done by telehealth.
ViTel Net helped offset the revenue gap by competing for and winning with partner Avel eCare an award from the US Army to build a National Emergency Tele critical Care Network to deliver critical care expertise and support to regions whose health systems were being overwhelmed with COVID patients and had providers practicing above their licensure out of necessity.
In four weeks, we delivered an initial proof of concept that was refined over another four weeks before services were delivered to rural hospitals and patients at home using our platform. We have since supported two additional COVID waves and are preparing to support hurricane-related disasters.
With continuous development in technologies such as AI and ML, what is your prediction about the future of the virtual care services market?
Virtual care services will continue to become more patient-centric.
In conjunction with advanced sensors in wearables and devices that have become part of our everyday lives, technologies like AI and ML enable individuals to be more active in managing their own care.
With health systems aggressively moving to enterprise virtual care platforms since the summer of 2020, care will become more continuous with asynchronously captured patient information leading to better intelligence for more effective real-time visits.
As an established leader, what would be your advice to the budding entrepreneurs and enthusiasts aspiring to venture into the HealthTech space?
Focus on the unique value you bring to the space and partner for value add to round out what you’re offering. Reinventing the wheel just burns resources and sets you up for expensive sales cycles in red oceans.
How do you envision scaling your company’s operations and offerings in 2022 and beyond?
ViTel Net has just announced a revamped solution portfolio to extend the value of our platform to ALL prospective health system partners, regardless of their size or current position on the virtual care maturity curve.
We introduced vCareXpressTM, which delivers pre-configured turnkey applications for health system partners that need to go live immediately and whose needs are met by a well-appointed prescribed offering. vCarePathwaysTM improves patient engagement between in-person or virtual visits for better outcomes and extends the value of existing EHR and video visit investments.
vCareEnterpriseTM is our flagship offering that provides complex health systems maximum flexibility to establish and scale programs across the care continuum that are tailored to their unique healthy environment and workflow needs. The entire portfolio of solutions is delivered from the vCareCommand cloud platform, providing for seamless growth paths and limitless scalability.
Provide us details regarding the awards and recognition that your company has achieved thus far since its inception.
ViTel Net has received many awards and accolades since its inception in 1990, including US congressional funding in the early 2000s to develop virtual care solutions for the Department of Defence and Department of Veterans Affairs.
Most recently, ViTel Net and its clinical partner Avel eCare were select from 78 teams to build a National Emergency Tele Critical Care Network for the US Government in response to the health emergency created by the COVID-19 pandemic. KLAS, an independent third-party analyst firm wholly focused on health IT, recently interviewed a cross-section of ViTel Net’s vCareCommand health system partners and published its First Look Report.
ViTel Net earned 100% overall customer satisfaction with every customer interviewed stating that they would buy again from ViTel Net and would recommend ViTel Net to others.
The Journey of an adept leader
ViTel Net’s Chief Operating Officer, Mark Noble, got started in the virtual care space 15 years ago when he was responsible for vertical market strategy at an innovative videoconferencing company. Healthcare stood out as a market that was primed for disruption with a ballooning cost of care, a growing shortage of clinical workforce, and a large portion of the population in rural communities that struggled with access to care.
Combining that with technological advances at the time, including personal devices entering the market that could be used as video communication endpoints and rapidly expanding access to broadband Internet, Mark saw telehealth as a market where his advantaged video communications platform could make a difference.
In 2007, he went to a telehealth resource centre meeting in Kansas to begin having conversations with health system leaders with an interest in virtual care. Not long after that, the company had its first telehealth programs in place with health systems. Mark fell in love with the mission of virtual care as he began hearing the stories of the people whose lives had been saved or vastly improved thanks to the programs built in partnership with health systems.
As the industry matured and the videoconferencing company had captured over a third of the market, Mark recognized that video communication was not enough to support scalable virtual care programs. Health system partners needed a solution that would solve their workflow challenges and facilitate greater access to patient health information.
ViTel Net was one of Mark’s ecosystem partners, and founder and CEO, Allen Izadpanah, shared with Mark the vision he had that led to the development of vCareCommandTM, solving the challenges of scale, access to data, ease of use, and adaptability.
It was exactly what Mark’s health system partners had been asking for. Allen recruited Mark to ViTel Net in 2018 for his expertise in the market space and track record of growing successful technology companies.
Since then, the company has quadrupled its deployed health system partner base and retooled its solution offerings to align with the needs of all health systems, regardless of size or where they are on the virtual care maturity curve.
