As part of our longstanding relationship with the southeastern Virginia community we serve, Riverside Health has always been committed to adopting the safest, highest-efficiency, most advanced ways to provide excellent health care. In recent years, amid the explosion of technology, the constantly changing health care landscape and rising consumer demand that necessitates forward-thinking growth, many health systems like us are finding that it makes sense to reevaluate our service delivery methods, whether that means collaborating in new ways, reorganizing departments, updating clinical tools, streamlining processes, adding new services — or all of the above.
In late 2024, Riverside Health embarked on such an opportunity by developing our Integrated Care Command Center, or IC3, bringing remote, system-wide services into one central department to comprehensively serve all of our hospitals and medical facilities. The first steps of this initiative involved the natural combination of the following three existing pillars of service.
Riverside Nurse, a free community phone service that we’ve been providing to the region since 1988, provides trusted triage, patient education, post-discharge support and a pathway to in-person care when appropriate. Our Transfer Center coordinates vital ground and flight transportation for patients moving between facilities and to appointments as needed. Lastly, our Virtual Services division encompasses both facility-based and at-home telemedicine, which expands access to specialized care in rural areas, improves patient outcomes, connects medical expertise and saves costs. Bringing these similar remote services together under one organizational umbrella and one physical location in the heart of our service area was just the start.
Since then, we’ve begun expanding this new central hub of services, a model that is becoming an industry standard across the country. Among its diverse benefits are more efficient patient flow, higher employee satisfaction, reduced length of stay, increased safety catches, more direct internal communication, a more seamless experience for patients and the financial savings that results from consolidating multiple hospital-specific departments into one source of support for an entire health care organization.
Recently, a virtual sitting service that was previously only operational at our flagship hospital, Riverside Regional Medical Center (RRMC), moved to the new IC3 with a goal to make virtual sitting available to all Riverside hospitals and potentially support senior care in our Lifelong Health service line. Using a third-party platform, AvaSure, this program allows a remote technician to observe and communicate with up to 12 high-risk patients at a time, monitoring for fall risk, altered mental status, medical equipment tampering, drug misuse and other dangers. The technician can alert on-site staff to respond as necessary.
Apart from the implementation of virtual sitting, an in-person sitter is required for each individual patient. Though this 1:1 practice will still be used in some situations, virtual sitting has been highly successful at preventing adverse events and freeing up clinical resources, and we’re excited to utilize this hospital care enhancement more broadly.
Currently under construction within our IC3 is the addition of a centralized telemetry monitoring unit, which will go live this fall. This will enable one pool of staff to remotely monitor patient data, such as cardiac function, in all of our hospitals simultaneously from one location.
Using a combination of software-driven automation and specially trained technicians, physiological information will be continuously collected from sensors in patient rooms and processed, immediately triggering alerts to on-site staff when a critical problem is detected. This kind of concentrated monitoring system directly contributes to patient safety and streamlined operations, reducing unnecessary burdens and alarm fatigue for onsite clinicians while allowing a sharper level of focus on monitoring vital patient data around the clock.
Planning is also underway for a 2026 introduction of virtual nursing to supplement our in-person hospital care teams. Virtual nursing, practiced at respected institutions like Johns Hopkins Medicine, is an opportunity for seasoned acute care nurses at Riverside to provide remote support to bedside nurses, especially those who are newer to the profession, while providing prompt attention to our patients.
From Riverside’s IC3, our virtual nurses will be able to interact directly with patients via their in-room TVs, answering questions, providing education, assisting with admission and discharge, monitoring conditions and intervening in care when needed. With privacy measures in place and the primary responsibility still placed with the bedside nurse, this solution benefits patients and employees alike.
Virtual sitting, telemetry and nursing will all fall under Riverside Health’s growing Virtual Services pillar within the IC3, joining our previous base of telemedicine services.
Understandably, beginning such a venture initially involves staffing changes and transfers, new training, innovative collaboration, additional hardware and software, facility space, workflow fine-tuning and intentional communication, but we are confident that these investments will achieve substantial gains in safety and efficiency.
Ultimately, by centralizing services that support so many aspects of modern health care, the Integrated Care Command Center is a powerful new way for Riverside Health to carry out our goal to provide our patients with the right care in the right place, at the right time — every time.