Scaling Virtual Care Is Both a Moral and Financial Imperative, Sanford Health Exec Says

In rural America, virtual care often means the difference between care and no care.

Few people know this to be true more than Dave Newman, chief medical officer of virtual care at Sanford Health . For more than 13 years, he has been working at the Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based health system, which operates 56 hospitals and 288 clinics in several states across the Upper Midwest.

At Sanford, virtual care is defined as “anything that’s not face-to-face,” Newman noted during a fireside chat on Thursday at MedCity News ’ INVEST Digital Health conference in Dallas.

Many people think virtual care just means video telemedicine visits, but Sanford has expanded far beyond that, he said. For instance, the health system provides remote patient monitoring to help manage patients’ chronic con