Virtual Nursing Programs Are Transforming Patient Care

Registered nurse Janelvin VanBuren admits patients to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, teaches them how to use medical devices like feeding tubes and spirometers, and completes their discharge papers without ever stepping into their hospital rooms. Instead, she connects with patients through the 55-inch television screen mounted in their room from a virtual nursing hub at the Sentara facility in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

As a virtual nurse, VanBuren is an instrumental part of the care team, even if she’s not at the patient’s bedside.

“As a bedside nurse, you don’t have as much time as you would like to dedicate extra time…to the patients and their families,” VanBuren told Medscape Medical News. “What I like most about virtual nursing care is we have time to dedicate to educating patients about their chronic illnesses and answer questions…or ease any fears they may have about their health.” 

Virtual care is not new, but it reached a fever pitch during the pandemic, and it’s become a growing part of delivering care 5 years later. In 2024, 46% of hospitals piloted or implemented virtual care, and 74% reported that virtual care is (or will become) integral to their care delivery models.

Implementing Digital Patient Care

Virtual nursing is a tested healthcare model that integrates virtual nurses with the bedside care team. Virtual nurses are experienced advanced practice nurses whose responsibilities include patient education, safety and surveillance, admissions, discharge, and staff mentoring.

Some hospitals install fixed screens in patient rooms, while others use digital screens or iPads to connect patients with their virtual nurses. Regardless of the technology, virtual nursing has been shown to increase patient and nurse satisfaction and reduce turnover and adverse events.

Jaime Carroll, vice president of clinical support for Sentara, calls virtual nursing “a huge game changer for our nursing teams.”

Sentara Norfolk General Hospital launched the virtual nursing program in 2024 and the health system plans to expand to 1800 beds across 12 hospitals by late 2025. Likewise, Jefferson Health introduced a virtual nursing program in 2023 that pairs virtual nurses with bedside nurses on two medical/surgical units at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia.

According to Andrew Thum, director of Health System Nursing Workforce Operations at Jefferson Health, the goal was not to replace bedside care.

“We didn’t take a nurse off the unit and make them virtual, and now the unit has one less nurse,” Thum explained. “The intent was leveraging new resources to be able to provide the same high-quality care that we’re giving patients today but being able to ensure that we can sustain that in the future.”

Both health systems installed fixed television screens in patient rooms instead of taking the extra steps to shuffle iPads between rooms for virtual nursing sessions; it was a decision that came down to convenience and workflow for bedside nurses.

Jefferson Health and Sentara also set up dedicated virtual nursing hubs in spaces outside of the hospitals. Communication is built into the electronic health record: Bedside nurses enter a task, and it goes into the queue for virtual nurses; care teams at the bedside and in virtual locations can also communicate via secure messaging.

“It’s easier to manage people that are [in a central location] and keep the standardization,” Carroll said. “If you put virtual nurses in the hospital, it would be too easy to think, ‘I’ll just pull the virtual nurse to cover this,’ and then we lose the benefit of having a virtual nursing program.”

Embracing the Virtual Care Model

Although she connects with patients from behind a screen in a cubicle, VanBuren still wears scrubs and a nametag and provides the same level of knowledgeable, compassionate care that she provided at the bedside.

While nursing skills are invaluable, virtual nurses must be able to connect with their patients without being in the room, an additional challenge. Sentara schedules virtual interviews to see how prospective virtual nurses present themselves on camera and conducts extra training to help virtual nurses perfect their screen presence. It’s an extra step to help patients feel comfortable interacting with a healthcare provider on screen.

Patients have embraced virtual nursing. The model has the potential to empower patients to become meaningful partners in their healthcare and leads to better quality care and safer outcomes. In one survey, 100% of patients provided positive feedback on their virtual nursing experience.

Virtual care benefits nurses too. Carroll said that new nurses working at the bedside gain additional support and mentorship from advanced practice nurses.

“New nurses are learning how to manage their patients and learning how to coordinate that while constantly having competing priorities,” she said.

Experienced nurses who may struggle with the physical demands of providing care at the bedside are excited that virtual nursing can extend their careers. In fact, virtual nursing has been hailed as a model that can better support patients and nursing staff and a possible solution to address the nursing shortage.

“If [admission, discharge, and education] are done by a virtual nurse, it allows them to leave at the end of the day feeling like they did a really great job and that supports them in their careers,” said Carroll.

“[Virtual nursing] is an opportunity that allowed experienced nurses to continue to do what they love into the foreseeable future,” said Thum. “We’re very happy to have their engagement and enthusiasm for the role as well as their clinical expertise, which has already [been] a true benefit, not only in terms of supporting newer to practice staff…but also from just being able to…get [teams on the frontlines] engaged in this type of care model.”

But virtual nursing is not without challenges. It requires a significant investment in technology, changes to workflow, dedicated spaces for virtual nursing hubs, and education to gain support from nurses and patients.

Sentara held town halls to get feedback from nurses on how a virtual nursing program could benefit their workflows and conducted regular surveys to get additional feedback, making tweaks as needed. Technology kinks are a given, according to Carroll. It also necessitates a holistic view of patient care to maximize the investments.

“We need to think creatively about different care team models that we can put in place to ensure that there’s enough resources…at the frontline to care for patients in the future,” said Thum.

He is considering additional use cases for the television screens in patient rooms, including virtual patient monitoring and virtual provider consults, case management, social work, and even pastoral care — all provided to patients via screens. Despite the challenges, virtual nursing is being hailed as the wave of the future, and health systems are investing in the success of their virtual nursing programs.

Jodi Helmer is a freelance journalist who writes about health and wellness for Fortune, AARP, WebMD, Fitbit, and GE HealthCare.