Data Report: Unlocking Digital Patient Engagement With On-Demand Virtual Care

Healthcare hinges on moments in time. A healthcare organization’s ability to capture these moments can be the difference between what makes care good, bad, or altogether non-existent.

The moment a person receives a diagnosis, for example, is a unique window of time in which that person is most motivated to take control of their health, eager to learn more about their condition, and ready to follow through with their treatment plan. Too often, that person will have to wait over a month for a follow-up appointment. As the weeks pass, their motivation wanes, and by the time their appointment arrives, their sense of urgency has faded: they may not feel it’s needed, that it may not be worth the time or cost. Meanwhile, their condition persists, and left untreated, likely worsens.

Patient Engagement Challenges

Patient engagement has long been a critical gap in care that the healthcare system has struggled to bridge by traditional means. The structural inefficiencies that prohibit timely care are endemic to our system, and persist across the country: 80% of U.S. counties lack adequate healthcare infrastructure, leaving 100 million Americans without a primary care provider. These fragmentations perpetuate long patient wait times, disconnected care experiences, and a lack of support for patients at their greatest moments of need.

The fact is, traditional care delivery systems have failed to mend these divides. Our latest data report delves into why, highlighting the figures that continue to make patient engagement an intractable challenge – and outlining how healthcare organizations can bridge these gaps with next-generation virtual care solutions built for on-demand experiences.

The Hidden Costs of Delayed Care

While it’s obvious that getting patients the care they need, when they need it leads to better outcomes and lower costs, healthcare organizations are stymied in their efforts to provide timely care by traditional care delivery systems – care delivery systems that will always be subject to the availability of local providers.

Despite America’s 1.1 million doctors and $4.5 trillion annual healthcare spend, many patients still face significant delays between their decision to seek care and actually seeing a doctor. On average, it takes 26 days to get a new patient appointment. The wait to see a specialist can stretch even longer, to 38 days. At this point, the opportunity for activation has passed, and patients are much more likely to disengage from their care plans entirely. It’s why as many as 20% of patients with chronic conditions stop taking their medication within the first month; any questions or concerns they may have about their health or treatment regimen remain unresolved until their next in-person appointment.

Looking ahead, these missed opportunities to engage patients are expected to worsen as the U.S. anticipates a shortage of 86,000 physicians by 2036. As this shortage continues, patient wait times will increase in tandem, further exacerbating the gap between the healthcare system’s capacity to deliver care and patients’ needs. Without intervention, the combination of delayed care and declining engagement will result in more untreated conditions, poorer outcomes, and higher healthcare costs.

Patient Activation with Digital Solutions

On-demand virtual care provides healthcare organizations with the flexibility they need to reduce delays and engage patients in critical moments. The ability to turn on care precisely when it's required enables momentum – the missing ingredient in many modern patient engagement strategies. By meeting patients at their moment of readiness and supporting them throughout their healthcare journey, on-demand virtual care helps reverse the trend of disengagement and ensures patients remain active participants in their care.

Gaps in Telehealth Strategy

Telehealth has come a long way since the early days of the pandemic, when its adoption skyrocketed as a short-term solution to bridge glaring gaps in care. At the time, it was primarily used as a cost containment tool, offering patients with specific environmental and economic conditions an affordable alternative to traditional in-person care. And while payers expanded coverage dramatically, much of their focus was on using telehealth to extend existing patient-doctor relationships – not as a long-term solution to transform the patient experience.

Several major pharmacies and major retailers have made this same mistake in recent years, and as a result, they’ve exited their virtual strategies just as quickly as they entered them. These were not failures of virtual care. Rather, they were failures of telehealth strategy: deploying virtual care purely as a more affordable site of care misses the bigger picture.

How Telehealth Improves the Patient Journey

The modern healthcare consumer expects more than just convenience. They want seamless integration into their healthcare journeys, ongoing support, and personalized experiences that extend beyond a single point in time. This is virtual care’s true potential for enabling generational change. Used in tandem with digital tools that offer real-time access, automated reminders, and health data integration, consumer-centric virtual care gives patients the freedom and incentive to stay more engaged and proactive in their healthcare.

That’s why, as our report highlights, virtual care isn’t going anywhere. As many as 80% of Americans have used virtual care at least once, and 23% have reported using it in the past four weeks. Millennials, in particular, are driving this shift, with 74% preferring teleconsultations over in-person visits.

The appeal goes beyond convenience, for both patients and providers: 55% of patients believe they receive better care via teleconsultations, and 52% of clinicians feel they deliver care more effectively through these digital channels.

The fact is, virtual care solutions that integrate fully into a patient’s ongoing care journey are transforming care experiences for the better. No longer just a cost-saving alternative, on-demand virtual care can provide continuity of care, foster deeper relationships between patients and providers, and help patients manage their health in real-time.

Healthcare Consumer Engagement Across the Journey

Re-imagine the scenario in which a person receives a diagnosis. With on-demand virtual care deployed and traditional barriers of time and location absent, healthcare organizations are able to address that person’s health concerns in a matter of minutes. This is the technology reshaping the healthcare landscape – and it’s not conventional healthcare stakeholders deploying it. This generational change is being led by consumer brands, life sciences, and digital health companies.

For these innovators, patient engagement is just the beginning. On-demand virtual care is a critical component of any long-term patient activation framework, supporting a dynamic model where patients, motivated by easy access to continuous, comprehensive care, are encouraged to stay proactive about their health.

Download our full report for a comprehensive look at the state of patient engagement and the role on-demand virtual care can play in designing strategies that improve care, reduce costs, and enhance brand value.