What 2025 Proved—and What It Sets Up for 2026
2025, in One Line
2025 was the year virtual care stopped being aspirational and started being operational.
Hospitals didn’t have the luxury of ideal conditions. Staffing pressure persisted.The margins stayed tight. Infrastructure aged. Cyber risk increased. And yet, virtual care programs haven’t stalled. They matured. Here’s how we performed:
- $3.96B cost savings
- $77.7M in labor savings
- 345% increase in virtual nursing interactions
- 125,000 falls avoided
- 5M+ hours of observation
- Most common reason for virtual observation was Fall Risk (46.3%) followed by cognitive impairment 19.3%
- 100k good catches
- more than 3M verbal interventions
- 90+ pieces of feedback submitted by customers that influenced 29 feature releases
- 56 languages used
These results weren’t projections or pilots. They were performance under pressure.
From “What’s Possible” to “What Performs”
For years, the industry talked about smart hospitals and rooms of the future. In 2025, hospitals asked a different question:
What works right now—with the teams, systems, and budgets we have?
The answer wasn’t all-in rebuilding or AI everywhere. It was progress that showed up in daily operations:
- fewer sitters
- safer patients
- supported clinicians
- measurable ROI
Virtual care proved its value not by being flashy, but by being reliable.
Smart Rooms, Reframed
By the end of 2025, “smart rooms” meant very different things depending on who you asked.
Some vendors framed them as fully connected environments built overnight.
Hospitals framed them as something more practical:
Visibility, safety, and workflow relief—without ripping out walls or overwhelming IT.
The most successful programs took a pragmatic path:
- virtual observation as the first layer of visibility
- virtual nursing where it removed friction fastest
- hybrid models that worked with existing infrastructure
- platforms that integrated cleanly and scaled deliberately
The takeaway was clear: modernization works when it respects reality. And speaking of a new reality….
Virtual Nursing: From Early Adoption to Practice Maturity
Over the past year, virtual nursing has generated mixed reactions across the industry. Some programs scaled smoothly. Others paused, adjusted, or reset after early challenges.
That variability isn’t a failure signal.
It’s a sign of change in progress.
Virtual nursing is not a turnkey solution. It is a care delivery model that requires intentional design, role clarity, and ongoing refinement. Like any new clinical practice, outcomes improve as workflows are aligned, teams are trained, and expectations are calibrated.
Every implementation looks different because every hospital is different. Staffing models, unit culture, technology environments, leadership priorities, and patient populations all shape how virtual nursing takes form. What works well in one organization—or even one unit—may require adaptation in another.
When virtual nursing programs struggle, the issue is rarely the concept itself. More often, it’s a signal that roles need clearer definition; workflows need adjustment, or adoption needs stronger support.
The organizations seeing the most durable results treat virtual nursing the same way they treat other major clinical transformations: as an iterative process. They design, test, learn, refine—and then scale.
That approach doesn’t lower the bar for success.
It’s how clinical practice advances.
What the Numbers Don’t Show, But the Trends Explain
The outcomes we saw in 2025 didn’t happen by accident. They reflected a broader shift happening across healthcare leadership—one that became clearer as the year unfolded.
As virtual care moved from pilot programs into daily operations, leaders across clinical, IT, product, security, and customer success began converging on the same conclusion: performance depends less on the technology itself and more on how intentionally programs are designed, supported, and evolved over time.
The perspectives that follow reflect what we heard repeatedly this year—from nurse leaders, informaticists, technologists, and operators working inside real hospital environments. Together, they help explain why some virtual care programs accelerated, why others needed recalibration, and what it takes to move from promise to performance.
Virtual Nursing Academy Founder, Dr. Bonnie Clipper DNP, MA, MBA, RN, CENP, FAAN
Virtual Nursing Adoption: The desire is high, but definitions are messy: In 2025, 74% of leaders said virtual nursing is the future of acute care, but fewer than 10% have mature programs. Why? Defined workflows aren’t standardized, and change management is the missing ingredient. Technology is expensive and isn’t doing what we need it to, fast enough. Time to focus on starting small and slow to prove the care model and attaining incremental ROI.
Hybrid Virtual Nursing Works: When It’s built incrementally. The hospitals that succeeded didn’t launch 20 workflows at once. They started slowly, with admissions, discharges, medication reconciliation, patient education, precepting on demand— the areas where virtual nurses give immediate relief to direct care nurses and outcomes. With 1-2 workflows and demonstrating a positive impact and then scaling to more units or adding more use cases is how the most successful organizations roll out virtual nursing. Moving to a virtual care model, where ensuring that all members of the clinical team are involved is valuable since the platforms can leverage all disciplines to provide more efficient and more accessible care.
Policy Finally Aligns with Practice: Permanent telehealth provisions mean virtual nursing is no longer a “temporary bridge” solution. It’s now a sustainable layer of care, making hybrid nursing models not just possible, but practical and financially defensible.
Virtual Nursing as an Iterative Process: Virtual nursing is an iterative process requiring continuous change management. If a program isn’t working, it doesn’t mean the institution should abandon it—it means they need to keep refining their approach until it does work. Every implementation is highly customized. Virtual nursing varies significantly institution by institution based on their model, staffing, technology, and goals. One hospital’s challenges don’t invalidate the proven success stories.
Dr. Christine Gall, DrPH, MS, BSN, RN, CNO
Designing Care Models That Work for Today’s Workforce
Workforce Reality vs. Smart Hospital Hype: In 2025, nursing shortages rose and burnout deepened—yet the industry conversation fixated on smart hospitals instead of supporting the humans delivering care. We need modernization that meets clinicians where they are, not visions that require infrastructure hospitals don’t have.
The Practical First Step: Safety & Visibility Before we can talk about ambient AI in every room, we need consistent visibility into patient safety risks. Virtual observation and hybrid virtual nursing models delivered real reductions in falls, LOS, readmissions, and staff injuries—measurable outcomes clinicians can trust.
A Clinical Enabler for Incremental Progress: Modernization doesn’t demand a leap into smart rooms; it removes friction, so hospitals can adopt hybrid models that support bedside teams. It lets us build safer, more predictable workflows one unit at a time—not all at once.
Paul Rouillard, SVP of Product
Building for Reality: Product Decisions That Scale Without Breaking Systems
The Tech Debt Truth Behind Smart Room Ambiguity: Most smart-room visions break down not because the ideas are wrong, but because infrastructures are old. Legacy TVs, siloed applications, aging networks—this is the real barrier we design around.
Hybrid, Smart-Room-Ready Architecture Over “All-In” Futurism: The future isn’t a rip-and-replace model. It’s hybrid: edge + cloud, interoperable APIs, and modular capabilities. Hospitals need platforms that work in 2026 conditions and evolve as infrastructure catches up, not systems that demand capital upgrades upfront.
Designing for Sustainable Growth: Virtual care’s rise and modernization trends allow us to roadmap responsibly focusing on scalable, secure workflows instead of racing toward features hospitals can’t implement yet. It rewards simplicity, interoperability, and progressive adoption.
Joel Maloof, VP of Customer Success
From Go-Live to Scale: Why Program Support Determines Performance
The #1 Signal from Hospitals: “We Need Clarity, Not More Tools”: Nearly every system we supported this year said the same thing: they’re overwhelmed by point solutions. They want one ecosystem, one login roadmap. The ambiguity around smart rooms only heightened this desire for simplification.
Outcomes Happen When Programs Are Supported, Not Installed: Our clients saved millions in sitter costs or realized more than a 40% reduction in safety events all shared one factor in common: structured onboarding, comprehensive training, and ongoing optimization. Virtual care fails when it’s treated like a plug-in; it succeeds when it’s a partnership. Research: ROI possible in <100 days; 75% sitter replacement; 20–45 min per nurse reclaimed.
Amplifying the Importance of “Doing This Well”: More hospitals are ready to scale virtual care—but scaling too fast without proper change management has the risk program fatigue. Our work shifted in 2025 from “go live” to “grow right.”
Jason Ward, VP of Information Systems
Virtual Care Resilience: Cybersecurity as a Foundation for Performance
Virtual care expanded both opportunity and complexity. As virtual nursing, hybrid workflows, and smart-room-ready infrastructure scaled in 2025, so did the attack surface—and the operational burden on IT teams managing fragmented systems, integrations, and vendors.
Security by design reduced risk and technical debt. Organizations that consolidated platforms, standardized integrations, and embedded identity, encryption, and vendor governance into their virtual care architecture lowered exposure while easing the day-to-day load on stretched IT teams.
In 2026, resilience means fewer systems—not more controls. The most durable virtual care programs pair security with simplification, allowing IT teams to support scale without adding headcount, complexity, or fragile workarounds.
Holly Jenkins, VP of Clinical Services & Training
Hybrid Nursing as a Structural Shift
Workforce augmentation matured into a structural layer, redistributing non-bedside work, extending the reach of experienced nurses, and creating flexibility within staffing ratios—without adding burden or burnout.
Hybrid models delivered measurable cost efficiency at scale. By shifting appropriate work out of the room and stabilizing coverage, +Staff helped hospitals significantly reduce premium labor reliance and overtime while preserving continuity and quality of care.
Looking to 2026, resilience will come from design—not headcount. Hybrid nursing models are emerging as a practical way to protect bedside care, control labor costs, and give clinical teams the support, backup, and flexibility needed to sustain performance under real-world constraints.
What 2025 Taught Us—and Why It Matters for 2026
The defining lesson of 2025 wasn’t about technology.
It was about execution.
Virtual care performs when it:
- starts with safety and visibility
- integrates into existing workflows
- scales without adding complexity
- is supported beyond go-live
- respects the humans delivering care
Virtual care is no longer experimental. But the gap between a pilot and a durable program remains wide—and it has nothing to do with features.
It has everything to do with clarity, integration, change management, and partnership.
As we move into 2026, progress won’t be defined by all-or-nothing smart hospitals.
It will be defined by steady, measurable performance—built one unit at a time, through virtual observation, virtual nursing, and hybrid models that work under real conditions.
That’s the shift from promise to performance.
And it’s the foundation for what comes next.