Virtual Palliative Care for Specialist and Primary Care Providers: Content
About Virtual Palliative Care
The Virtual Palliative Care Program provides support to patients who prefer to receive in-home palliative care by connecting them with their health care team.
The goal is to enable patient-driven care by monitoring symptoms from home, increasing access to resources for patients and families, and improving efficiency by reducing travel requirements, including for acute care.
Virtual palliative care offers:
- Quality: Clinical protocol alignment with Health Quality Ontario standards.
- Access: Real-time data accessible by interprofessional teams.
- Productivity: Improved workflow through a better interprofessional care model.
- Efficiency/Proactiveness: Guides care providers/clinicians to focus on what really needs their attention, making changes in the care plan.
Benefits of the Virtual Palliative Care
Virtual Palliative Care includes a platform with flexible protocols that provide real time assessment of patient status.
Virtual Palliative Care pulls data from patients wherever they are through mobile digital devices.
Providers can be alerted when changes in the patient’s condition identify a need for a proactive change in care plan, thereby reducing the need for patients to seek care in acute settings.
How does it work?
Palliative Care Specialists can refer patients that they feel need support to learn about their condition and how to manage it. Virtual Palliative care is:
- Personalized: The Virtual Palliative Care program aims to make receiving care and managing symptoms at a preferred location, such as home, as simple as possible by enabling patient-driven care through mobile powered virtual care.
- Home possible: Remote home monitoring means less time spent travelling to appointments, reduced unnecessary transfer to acute care/hospitals, and less unplanned emergency room visits.
- Interactive: Health assessments that focus on symptom and quality of life are sent to palliative care team in real time to better manage symptoms and outcomes.
- Monitored: A palliative care team member can help monitor patient conditions at a distance; if any readings suggest a change, they will contact the patient to identify the problem, find a solution, and connect others on the care team.
Who is Virtual Palliative Care for?
Palliative care protocols are designed to support a wide continuum of care needs of patients who would benefit from a palliative approach to care. The Virtual Palliative Care Program is appropriate for patients:
- with a life-limiting diagnosis,
- who are willing to accept a palliative approach to care,
- Interactive: Health assessments that focus on symptom and quality of life are sent to palliative care team in real time to better manage symptoms and outcomes.
- who are willing and able to operate technology solutions from their home with support.
OTN can help health care organizations design and implement solution-agnostic virtual palliative care. We have developed a Virtual Palliative Care protocol, and a Virtual Palliative Care Toolkit, and are available to support planning, implementation and evaluation.
We are here to work with palliative care teams to identify their needs and implement the program into their specific environment.
OTN is here to help your Palliative Care team get started with the program.
