The new frontier in employee benefits: Virtual specialty care

Virtual care 2.0 will be attractive to employers who are increasingly looking beyond traditional benefits offerings for new ways to support and engage their employees.

The health care system doesn’t make it easy to get answers. It is often perplexing for both employees and employers to navigate the process and get access to good, timely care. Paperwork, forms, the wait to see doctors, cost, miscommunications, bad referrals, and conflicting information online all get in the way of accessing quality, timely care.

One evolving answer to this frustration is virtual care with expanded on-demand services that offer benefits brokers and consultants new opportunities to offer their clients innovative solutions to improve health care. Thanks in part to the exponential adoption during COVID, virtual care is here to stay, but it is also evolving rapidly. The traditional telemedicine platform has become a commodity, with everyone from health systems to third-party platforms to health plans offering telemedicine. In effect, it has evolved into a tool to access care through the exact same health care system. The good news is “virtual care 2.0” is bringing new personalized virtual care models to market that deliver broad, high-quality solutions beyond primary and urgent care telemedicine.