Inside Sanford Health's $40M telehealth training center

A large rural health system is banking on a 60,000-square-foot building to take its virtual care efforts to the next level.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based Sanford Health on Tuesday rolled out its new $40 million virtual care center. With an eye towards rural patients, the center will help train clinicians use telehealth while accelerating development of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

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The move comes at a time when there is mixed support among providers for telehealth. A survey from consulting firm Deloitte published last month found while many patients want to keep using telehealth, some providers are reducing their virtual care offerings amid reimbursement uncertainty. Telehealth reimbursement flexibilities that started during COVID-19 are set to expire at the end of the year unless Congress extends them.

The Sanford Virtual Care Center includes mock exam rooms, an area that mimics a patient’s home and a dedicated room for virtual reality. It is meant to be a physical embodiment of the system’s focus on virtual care, said Dr. Dave Newman, chief medical officer of virtual care at the 45-hospital system. He said the physical space will help providers better connect with its patients during virtual appointments, which have become vital for a patient population that is spread across a vast geographic area.

"The virtual care center is a physical space where lots of our operations team is housed," Newman said. "We've got lots of cool things going on but it really epitomizes more of a culture change.”

Sanford's virtual care center was purposefully built to allow for future growth. The health system designed some of the building to be empty because healthcare changes rapidly. 

In addition to clinician education, Newman said the space will be home to a virtual primary care team including nurses and specialty providers. It will also house My Sanford Nurse, a call line that triages patients to the best location for their care. 

Sanford will partner with technology companies that need access to a larger system and help operationalizing their tools.

Philanthropist and businessman Denny Sanford's $350 million gift in 2021 helped fund the center. In addition to the physical space, a Sanford Health spokesperson said the funds would also support a virtual behavior health service in 24 of Sanford's critical access hospitals and help set up virtual behavior health scheduling tool directly to consumers through Epic's MyChart. Sanford also opened a satellite clinic in Lidgerwood, North Dakota to help patients access virtual care appointments in August 2023.

Sanford, which began offering virtual care in 2011, has provided more than 850,000 telehealth visits. Newman said systems that want to invest in virtual care should seriously look at creating a physical space where providers can train and experiment with new technology.

“It’s really for developing curriculum,” Newman said. “A lot of the curriculum that we developed there can be done virtually across our footprint. We want whatever is developed in the Virtual Care Center to be used all throughout Sanford. ”