Hospitals continue to experience significant financial headwinds in 2025, according to the American Hospital Association’s most recent Cost of Caring report. Rising labor costs, declining reimbursements, and increasing patient acuity, are converging to threaten the long-term sustainability of many hospital systems. Amid these challenges, high-acuity specialty telemedicine has emerged not simply as a convenience, but as a strategic investment. To quote a rural hospital CEO in a recent Modern Healthcare article, “you can’t cut yourself to prosperity. You have to look at where you can grow”. Virtual care can provide this sort of strategic path forward to help hospitals protect margins, meet increasing patient demand, and deliver measurable clinical value.
Labor Costs and Coverage Gaps
Hiring full-time, in-house specialists is increasingly untenable for many facilities, particularly in high-demand, low-supply specialties like neurology, psychiatry, infectious disease, and maternal-fetal medicine. Through integrated telemedicine programs, Access TeleCare enables hospitals to maintain 24/7 specialist coverage while avoiding the fixed costs of recruitment, benefits, and retention, as well as gaps in coverage if a physician is out.
Two of our member hospitals, for example, deployed a teleNephrology service line when facing the daunting challenge of hiring a replacement for their sole on-site nephrologist, and quickly realized positive financial and quality outcomes from having a dedicated pod of several teleNephrologists available on-demand.
Reducing Length of Stay and Keeping More Patients In-House
Optimizing length-of-stay and reducing transfers are key to hospital financial health and to patient outcomes.
Virtual specialty coverage helps hospitals retain more patients with complex needs that otherwise would have to be transferred to other facilities with specialty capacity. Our specialty telemedicine programs also accelerate ED throughput and reduce delays in specialty consults. From teleStroke coverage and nighttime hospitalist coverage to infectious disease consults and psychiatric crisis intervention, virtual specialists enable hospitals to move patients through care safely, efficiently, and without unnecessary escalation of care setting.
In Tennessee, six hospitals using Access TeleCare’s teleNeurohospitalist program reduced transfers of neurology patients by 60 percent and realized a 148 percent increase in neurology admission revenue within one year. Another system deployed teleNeurology and teleBehavioral health services and reduced LOS for behavioral health patients by nearly a full 12 hours, avoided $1.7 million in ED boarding costs, and increased neurology revenue by more than 400 percent. Yet another of our partner hospitals deployed our teleInfectious disease service and reduced length of stay by 10 percent and increased all-payer revenue by 25 percent.
Specialty telemedicine is no longer a novelty; it is a core strategy for financial resilience and clinical excellence. Explore more examples of how Access TeleCare helps hospitals across the country reduce cost pressures and elevate specialty care delivery.
