Virtual care isn't as simple as putting a video screen in between a doctor and patient. This is especially true of specialty care, where the issues are often complex, records need to be digitized and reviewed, and the quality of the interaction is critically important. Ensuring that a solution has a strategy for optimizing the experience of both physicians and consumers is key.

Here are four questions benefits professionals should ask when vetting virtual-care providers:

1. Does the solution provide access to top doctors?

There are great disparities in the quality of physicians available through virtual-care solutions. High-quality doctors have significant demands on their time, and there must be incentives to attract them to do work through virtual platforms. Some vendors don't invest enough in the physician experience and are therefore unable to attract or retain the best medical talent. In some cases, it's compensation that's lacking; in others, it's a question of poorly conceptualized clinical architecture, which makes accessing medical records and imaging unnecessarily onerous.

When evaluating a solution in specialty care, it's also important to verify that employees will have access to medical Centers of Excellence, and to vet the quality of individual doctors. That means reviewing hospital affiliations and associations with Centers of Excellence, and spending time understanding the details of the network—where physicians trained, areas of expertise, geographic coverage, and availability.

2. What are the details of clinical architecture?

Make sure you understand the user experience within the solution, and specifically how an employee's medical history, records, and imaging are organized and routed to physicians. A convoluted, disorganized process will lead to a terrible employee experience. Also find out how and when physicians receive access to clinical summaries to prepare themselves for each consultation.

Be sure to ask whether the vendor can integrate with a health system's EHR. If records resulting from appointments through a virtual-care provider are stuck in their own silo and can't be accessed by other doctors later on, your employees' experience will be exasperating.

3. What is the technology model?

Is the user interface of the solution easy to navigate, and can it help employees with any health query—from migraines to mental health to a cancer diagnosis? If the solution is overly narrow, people won't use it. The same holds true if the product is clunky or non-intuitive. Make sure the vendor gives you a test account so you can experiment with a range of use cases and see the experience for yourself before making commitments on behalf of your employees.

It's also important to ask about the triage mechanism, or how the provider matches patients with doctors. If it seems like the solution simply routes patients to the next available doctor in a rotation, nix it from your shortlist. Algorithmic curation can help to ensure that the solution is scalable, but the matching shouldn't be entirely data-driven. In other words, tech and a human touch should both have a role.

4. What hard data can the virtual care solution show?

Put the onus on the vendor to show you real data to verify quality. For example, how long does it take to connect with a doctor? If a solution is simply putting "virtual" inside the traditional care delivery model, employees will experience the same wait time and rushed visits they get during an in-person visit. Avoid any solution that relies on a "shot-clock" model, where the length of a consultation is tightly constrained. Instead, your vendor's business model should incentivize doctors to be thorough and to answer every question. This is especially important for specialty medicine; on the other hand, a 10-15 minute appointment is often sufficient for a primary-care doctor to address a routine issue.

You should also ask about hard outcomes data, such as the percentage of the provider's engagements that resulted in improved treatment plans. If they can't supply that or you're not satisfied with the data you receive, ask to speak to existing customers to find out what kind of utilization and outcomes they're seeing.

While the pandemic has been a watershed for virtual care, and more patients and doctors than ever are open to it, the devil is truly in the details. If your chosen solution offers a sub-par experience, then negative word of mouth will spread among your employees, and utilization will lag. But if you ask the right questions up front, a high-quality virtual care solution will drive incredible value for your employees, lead to better outcomes, and help you put much-needed pressure on your cost of health care.

Julian Flannery is CEO and co-founder of Summus Global, a leading virtual specialist platform that has garnered a network of 4000+ top specialists from 48 leading medical institutions. Summus is creating a new hybrid category, bringing greater value to corporations and employees. They use an expert-driven marketplace model to provide virtual access to Summus MDs and Experts across all health concerns, including; complex and serious diagnoses, ongoing and chronic conditions, behavioral health, and preventive and wellness topics.

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