Avera’s virtual health director talks innovation and change in health care

This paid piece is sponsored by Avera Health.

What will health care look like in 20, 10 or even five years?

With fast-moving technology, it’s hard to even imagine – other than the certainty that it will change in ways yet to be discovered.

This is what gets Kristine Becker excited as she comes to work every day. As Avera’s director of virtual health, she has her finger on the pulse of tomorrow’s health care system. And she’s excited for an opportunity to be part of the process.

“Tech will continue to grow,” she said. “How we use it today and tomorrow to improve outcomes will likely make us all look back in wonder on how it once was.”

Becker is a long way from where she started with a degree in anthropology 20 years ago – a degree focused on analyzing how things once were.

Guiding the future to create effective care

She later got a degree in organizational development, and that led her to health care.

“I started with Avera working on a team focused on process improvements,” she said. “Our focus was our clinics, and it meant spending time in them and learning how they worked.” In that role, she worked with clinic leaders and health care providers to make the patient experience better.

As part of the team, Becker provided her leaders with ideas from research. They provided feedback, and together they made improvements patients noticed. These wins served to fuel Becker’s development; she wasn’t giving direct care but helping improve how it could reach more patients efficiently.

Kristine Becker, left, explains some of the features for health monitoring while talking to Madeline Snyder, Avera virtual health product manager at Avera McKennan. Snyder holds a device that allows a provider to monitor health vital signs from afar with the patient’s help.

Now, as Avera’s director of virtual health, she explains that virtual health is much more than talking to a doctor on your smartphone. “Virtual health is an evolving, organic review and revision of how we provide bedside care,” she explained. “The fact Avera recognized this so early and adapted methods to serve a wide-ranging rural population makes our efforts in 2024 and beyond further advanced.”

Turning ideas into reality for patient care

The lessons she learned over the years she now hopes to share with members of the virtual health team who develop ideas, products and procedures that can make health care more accessible to more patients.

“We innovate not for the sake of innovation but to serve patients,” she said. “Our programs aid doctors, nurses and other care professionals as they reach patients across 72,000 square miles of the Midwest.

“Seeing programs work means a lot to me,” she said. “We continue to test and improve pilot programs and create new ones.”

Becker said this exploration is one of her passions because it draws on good ideas from many parts of the team.

“Work that supports the roots of our health ministry and its mission – that’s what led me to Avera,” she said. “It’s exciting to see health care technology evolve, and it happens fast. But seeing how it improves care and has positive impacts on our patients – that’s truly the reward.”

Successes in virtual care

Avera provides telehealth services in 19 areas, from emergency and intensive care to virtual nursing care and radiation oncology. “We conduct more than 30,000 virtual visits in patients’ homes each year,” Becker said. “We’ll soon add a virtual obstetrics program.” The program lets an experienced OB nurse monitor fetal heart tones and multiple patients across many Avera facilities.

With virtual programs such as nursing and monitoring, technology lets a remote patient care technician or nurse cover the care of several patients on a large monitor.

If and when needed, that professional can relay information to bedside teams. It’s a way of making resources go further, all while maintaining the highest standards of care.

“Our pilot program for virtual monitoring covered 89 beds at two facilities,” she added. “We use the program, in part, to reduce possible falls. Our virtual care team cared for more than 1,500 patients, and we saw distinct reductions in fall risk as well as fall incidence.”

Avera continues to work with vendor partners to expand virtual care platforms such as using ambient listening to help with documentation and artificial intelligence applications.

“The bedside staff identified some great use cases for these platforms,” Becker said. “Careful monitoring can reduce recovery time and improve outcomes.”

Becker develops programs with a wide-ranging team from clinical, administrative and virtual health teams.

“Virtual care will keep evolving if we keep our eyes on quality and realize a more consumer-centric health care model is on its way to all our clinics and hospitals,” Becker said. “These new beginnings and changes are the driving forces behind our work. I hope I can lift our teams who have new ideas as leaders did for me.”

Read more about what’s happening at Avera at Avera.org/Balance.