I knew the state of quality assurance (QA) in virtual care was bad...but even I was shocked: A recent Verbal survey found that *less than a third* of healthcare organizations #QA virtual care visits more than once per month.
Even worse, many organizations do *no QA at all* ??
Even among those that do regular QA, the majority only review call notes, not full transcripts or audio recordings, leaving valuable context on the table.
Lax QA is especially concerning in the context of value-based care (VBC) and companies offering employer-sponsored health programs, as revenues are directly tied to care quality and patient outcomes.
How can we drive positive outcomes (or revenue, for that matter), with such limited QA?
Here's a detailed look at the survey's findings:
?? Many organizations do no QA at all: 18% of respondents said they have no QA program in place.
?? The majority do QA once per month or less: 49% of respondents said they conduct monthly QA audits, while another 3% only do QA once per quarter.
?? Less than a third do QA more than once per month: Only around 30% of respondents said they do QA multiple times per week (18% of total), weekly (7% of total) or bi-monthly (5% of total).
?? Next to no one reviews call audio: Only around 4% of respondents have a QA program that covers both traditional call notes and audio recordings.
If you've been on the frontlines of virtual care, this may come as no surprise.
Teams must manually review notes to get a sense of how things are going, and few have the time or resources to do comprehensive QA with any frequency.
Even if they could keep up with frequent, comprehensive call QA, they'd still need to notice trends, share feedback and track changes over time to ensure standards are met.
That's just not realistic for most care teams.
So struggling staff continue to make the same mistakes and teams only get alerted to issues by low NPS and patient satisfaction scores (or get flamed online; see Rolfe Winkler's WSJ piece on the failed promise of virtual mental-health care for some particularly egregious examples).
For many teams, it's: "No news is good news." ??
But with #virtualcare now firmly a part of our healthcare experience and more and more leaders recognizing the need to shift to #valuebasedcare, we need to take a hard look at how this attitude can impact patients and what we can do to overcome it.
After all, some of the most at-risk patients rely on quality virtual care, as Anuja Vaidya touched on in a recent piece for mHealthIntelligence, which covered one study that found that no-shows were 56% lower for transgender and gender-diverse youth in rural areas using telehealth.
At the heart of the problem is a resourcing challenge, and as Heather Landi and the Fierce Healthcare team have covered extensively, #AI is increasingly seen as a major part of the solution by healthcare and business teams alike.
Read Verbal’s full survey findings and analysis here:
