The Widening Gap: Patient Acuity & Hospital Pressures
Hospitals today are under significant pressure from staffing shortages, rising costs, and increasing patient acuity. According to the American Nurses Foundation, workforce shortages are straining healthcare access and quality: 56% of nurses report burnout, 39% say they expect to leave their job soon, and over half say their units lack qualified RNs, undermining the delivery of high-quality care. At the same time, rising costs are creating financial instability, pressuring hospitals to do more with fewer resources, while increasing patient acuity further intensifies these issues by demanding more expertise. Combined, these challenges widen the gap between the care patients need and what hospitals are able to provide.
Addressing the Critical Gap
Addressing this gap is critical for both the health system and the patient. Virtual nursing and telesitting closes this widening gap by extending skilled clinical support right where hospitals feel the most strain—at the bedside, in real time, and without adding pressure to already overburdened teams.
This is done by investing in adjunct teams of experienced nurses and trained safety observers, giving hospitals continuous observation and reliable support that enhances both safety and efficiency. Together, these solutions are restoring valuable time to clinicians, strengthening care coordination, and ensuring patients receive the attention their acuity demands, narrowing the gap between what hospitals are expected to deliver and what their current staff and resources can realistically support. Virtual care provides critical support to both tertiary and rural healthcare settings.
Virtual Nursing and Telesitting: What’s the Difference?
VirtuAlly delivers targeted, tech-enabled solutions to support clinical teams where they need it most. Whether your organization needs experienced nurses providing remote clinical support, patient education, and discharge coordination to improve efficiency and patient outcomes, or you need scalable, real-time patient monitoring command center to reduce falls, enhance safety, and cut sitter costs, each model provides value and a distinct solution for your institution. Let’s break them down.
Virtual Nursing: Extending the Impact of Your Bedside Team
Virtual nursing offers experienced nurses who provide remote clinical support, patient education, and discharge coordination. Expanding the reach of clinical care without exhaustive on-site teams and the burden of space, hospitals can deliver high-quality care more efficiently and cost-effectively.
This is a solution to care that offers:
- Less professional burnout
- Improving admission workflow
- Nurse-to-nurse support
- Flexibility care models
- Patient satisfaction
Virtual nursing provides measurable results, as it
- Returns approximately 120 minutes to bedside nurses each shift
- Boosts nursing engagement by 42%
- Speeds up patient discharge by 32%
Adding virtual nursing to your institution enhances operational efficiency, strengthens clinical workforce, and elevates the patient experience.
Telesitting from VirtuAlly: Allies in Service, Partners in Purpose
Through scalable, real-time patient monitoring, our observers foster safe, supportive, and nurturing environments for patients and nurses. Telesitting is designed to address a comprehensive list of safety concerns including fall risk, moderate and low suicidal ideation, and safety for seniors in a variety of inpatient settings.
Our tailored care approach provides:
- Advanced patient safety
- Dedicated 24/7 observation
- Reduction in workplace violence events
- Fall prevention
VirtuAlly’s proven telesitting results bring:
- Average savings of $150k per unit
- Potential 90% reduction in 1:1 sitter costs
- 50-70% decrease in patient falls per facility
Integrating telesitting into your care model strengthens patient safety, protects your staff, and optimizes resources.
Integrating Virtual Nurses Into Clinical Operations
Virtual nursing is designed to enhance the current clinical operations and workflows.
Empowering nurses and patients alike, virtual nursing takes a significant burden away from hospital staff. As an extension of the bedside team, virtual nurses specialize in patient care through administrative tasks, quality surveillance and education.
Easing the pressure in hospitals, bedside nurses are able to focus on hands-on patient care, without the stress—giving them more time and more presence to deliver the compassionate, connected care that these patients need.
Our virtual nurses bring a depth of expertise to every interaction, with an average of 13 years of bedside experience guiding their care. Their seasoned judgment ensures that patients receive informed, compassionate support that blends years of clinical bedside wisdom with virtual precision and the human touch.
Better Patient Outcomes
Virtual nurses ensure that all details of clinical support, education and discharge are handled. By offloading high-volume, time-consuming tasks, virtual nurses free bedside staff to give their full attention to the hands-on care only they can provide. Additionally, they are able to prioritize the patient’s emotional needs.
As patient outcomes improve, health systems experience a wide range of clinical, operational, financial, and reputational benefits.
A More Resilient Healthcare System
Hospitals gain built-in flexibility, operational stability, and clinical consistency when nursing capacity is expanded utilizing virtual nursing and telesitting.
This expanded capacity translates into meaningful improvements across the entire system. Additionally, it fortifies a hospital’s ability to absorb pressure, adapt, as well as maintain high-quality care despite workforce shortages, unpredictable demand, and rising patient acuity.
When health systems are stronger, the impact is felt by all: patients, nurses, and entire hospital teams.
Options to Meet Your Needs
Following our seamless process, we offer three distinct options for continued care from our team. Each option gives you direct access to collaboratively plan and implement your workflow.
Complete Staffing Solution
Our bespoke services offer continuous, 24/7 virtual monitoring with complete resources. Around the clock, our virtual nurses and virtual safety observers deliver both virtual nursing and telesitting staffing support.
Our implementation team works collaboratively to design workflows that make the transition seamless. We offer periodic training and regular strategy sessions to build your team’s confidence and proficiency with the technology.
Flexible Staffing Model
Our flexible staffing model allows healthcare organizations to customize how our care team extends to effectively support theirs. This approach can provide partial or temporary support helping you scale where it is needed most.
Consulting Expertise
Our consulting expertise empowers your team to leverage our strategic guidance to strengthen your organization. We specifically provide consultation around technology, data, and virtual workflow integration. Through our strategic guidance, we offer a variety of resources.
We bring deep experience in virtual nursing and telesitting, and use that for hiring and training support for on-premise or virtual staff. We collaborate with your team to refine your workflow, ensuring the technology is integrated smoothly into your team’s processes and systems.
How Health Systems Partner with VirtuAlly
Our Three Step Process
Discover
By evaluating your current clinical operations, workflow, and technology, we identify where virtual support can create the greatest impact and enhance the patient and care team’s experience. Together, we design a solution that works within and compliments your existing system.
Design
In collaboration with your team, we develop additional protocols and virtual workflows, test your technology, guide your staff, and define the scope of work to ensure success. Every improvement is designed to strengthen safety, reduce variation between systems, and improve outcomes, so your team can focus on what matters most: bedside patient care.
Additionally, while we are not technology agnostic, we work with a wide variety of top tier technology parters that we have vetted. This means that we will make technology recommendations that best suit your needs.
Deploy
Our team works to seamlessly deploy our virtual services through a comprehensive and collaborative implementation process.
Key Outcomes Hospitals Can Expect
Stronger Teams. Better Care. Real Results.
As a Joint Commission accredited team, VirtuAlly helps you to turn your virtual care vision into reality. With proven processes, flexible service models, and commitment to collaboration, we empower and support healthcare systems through virtual caring solutions.
Because when nurses are supported, patients can feel it. When hospitals run more efficiently, outcomes improve. And when technology strengthens a system combined with remote patient observation adding connection at every step of the way…everyone wins.
Together, through virtual nursing and telesitting, VirtuAlly can transform care delivery and elevate the standard of healthcare for every patient, in any healthcare setting.