The promise of virtual care is to promote improved, high-quality health services. Optimized virtual care involves sharing health information with both patients and those involved in their care, including family members, caregivers, and health providers—individuals who often function under different policies, regulatory standards, locations, technology, and legislation. Achieving a high level of quality virtual care requires a deep level of policy, technical, and workflow alignment across Alberta’s health sector.
The Alberta Virtual Care Working Group—which ACP was a participant—was established as a collaborative effort to develop a consensus policy framework for virtual care in Alberta. Membership in the Working Group is broad and includes government, health regulators, health authorities, professional associations, and Indigenous and patient representation.
The Alberta Virtual Care Working Group is proud to present this report to their partners in health care, which proposes
- unifying design principles for virtual care in Alberta that uphold the delivery of quality care, and
- a proposed cooperative virtual care oversight model to support the delivery of the vision outlined in the design principles.
Optimizing Virtual Care in Alberta is a call for the re-imagination of digital health planning as a patient-centric, collaborative process, upholding the ideal that patient care is better served if partners in the health sector actively work together in virtual care design.
For pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, ACP has introduced its own guidelines: Providing virtual care to patients (*note that the guidelines have been replaced by ACP’s Standards of Practice for Virtual Care).
