Victoria’s statewide virtual emergency service is approaching one million consults, with its clinical model expanding across virtual wards and specialist care to create “the foundations of a virtual hospital.”
Victorian Virtual Emergency Departments director Dr Loren Sher said the service was expected to reach the one million patient milestone around late September or October.
Speaking at a La Trobe University National Science Week event, Dr Sher said the service was now seeing more than 1000 patients a day, rising to around 1250 on weekends.
The service has grown substantially since beginning at Northern Hospital in October 2020, initially seeing around 20 patients a day before expanding statewide in 2022.
It has since added virtual observation wards and a virtual specialist consultation service, which supports GPs through co-consultations with specialists and provides additional pathways for patients using the virtual emergency service.
Dr Sher said the different services could increasingly operate together, allowing patients to move between emergency, specialist and virtual ward care depending on their needs.
“It doesn’t matter where the entry point is – what’s important is that the patient is getting the right care that they need in the service or the virtual component of our service where they need it,” Dr Sher said.
“To my mind, what we’ve created is more than just virtual ED. We’ve created the foundation of a virtual hospital.”
The Victorian government is separately funding a Virtual Hospital pilot, which builds on the virtual ED service and is intended to provide specialist-led care in patients’ homes.
Dr Sher said around 80 per cent of patients using the virtual emergency service were able to remain at home, although she acknowledged some would not otherwise have required urgent or emergency-level care.
She also pointed to an economic analysis conducted with the Victorian Department of Health and health economics experts from Flinders University examining the impact of the service as activity grew between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 financial years.
Dr Sher said the analysis found the service had helped get an additional 16,000 paramedics back on the road over the period, while also reducing demand for emergency department cubicles and hospital beds.
She said the number of category four patients presenting to emergency departments across Victoria had fallen by around 10,000 in a typical month.
“We not only maintained efficiencies, but overall managed to avert significant ambulance ramping,” she said.
The virtual model is also being expanded into more complex care, including through a diabetes service launched in June 2024.
Dr Sher said a patient experiencing a diabetes-related problem could enter through virtual emergency care, be assessed by specialist clinicians and admitted to a virtual ward while they recovered.
The service can conduct regular check-ins and use data from continuous glucose monitors, while clinicians can also help program insulin pumps to optimise a patient’s diabetes management.
Patients who are no longer connected with their local diabetes service can be seen through virtual specialist clinics before being discharged back to their GP or local hospital service.
Dr Sher said the expansion was allowing virtual services to provide care across a broader spectrum – particularly for rural and regional patients who faced longer distances to hospital.
She said addressing digital inequity remained important as the service expanded, with its team examining usage data to identify communities that may be under-represented and potential barriers to accessing care.
This could include adding interpreter services or improving translated information, but Dr Sher said consumers also needed to be involved in developing services intended for different communities.
“You can produce whatever you want digitally and take your tool there, but if you haven’t engaged those consumers in the development of that tool or that model, you’re setting yourself up to fail,” she said.
Dr Sher said the focus was increasingly on using the different virtual services together rather than treating virtual emergency care as a standalone model.
Add Comment