Providing safe and high-quality virtual care: A guide for new and experienced users | Clinician Change Virtual Care Toolkit

The Clinician Change Virtual Care Toolkit shares information and resources of virtual care in practice to support clinicians with the tools they need to provide safe, high quality virtual care.

This toolkit contains:

• Streamlined information from trusted sources that can be used to plan for and improve virtual care services offered via different modalities, such as phone, video, secure messaging or remote patient monitoring. This toolkit includes helpful, evidencebased information focused on three priority areas that were identified and validated by stakeholders in the healthcare workforce:
  • Appropriateness
    Provides considerations for determining whether virtual care can be used, and which virtual care modalities would be most appropriate for particular circumstances.
  • Use and optimization of virtual care services
    Provides information to help address issues and challenges associated with enabling and delivering virtual care services, such as adaptation of clinical workflows (including technology, security and privacy considerations).
  • Quality and safe virtual care interactions
    Provides resources to help enhance the quality and safety of virtual care delivery, including communication (e.g., web-side manner, virtual relationship building) and assessment (e.g., conducting physical examinations virtually).
• Virtual care evaluation resources that can be consulted to inform plans and approaches for evaluating virtual care services and identifying areas for improvement.
• Additional virtual care tools and resources that were identified through an extensive environmental scan and stakeholder outreach activities. Key evidence from the selected tools and resources listed were leveraged to develop the streamlined content in this toolkit. These additional tools and resources are not meant to be an exhaustive repository of available virtual care resources.

This toolkit has been prepared by Canada Health Infoway and Healthcare Excellence Canada as a general guide to support clinicians with their use and implementation of virtual care. 

#About Healthcare Excellence Canada

Healthcare Excellence Canada (HEC) works with partners to spread innovation, build capability and catalyze policy change so that everyone in Canada has safe and high-quality healthcare. Through collaboration with patients, caregivers and people working in healthcare, we turn proven innovations into lasting improvements in all dimensions of healthcare excellence. Launched in 2021, HEC brings together the Canadian Patient Safety Institute and Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement. HEC is an independent, not-for-profit charity funded primarily by Health Canada. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of Health Canada.

#About Canada Health Infoway

At Canada Health Infoway (Infoway) we believe a more connected and collaborative system is a healthier system, and we work with governments, health care organizations, clinicians and patients to make health care more digital. We are working to ensure that everyone is able to access their personal health information, book appointments, get prescriptions, view lab test results and access other health services, online. We’re working with our partners to transform the health system because we know that digital in health can be as transformative as digital has been in other aspects of our lives. We’re an independent, not-for-profit organization funded by the federal government.