With 2024 in the books, it is time for another reflection post! The year has seen significant changes impacting healthcare from the perspective of staffing, policy, and even safety—all amidst intense political turmoil and promises of sweeping healthcare reforms. For many in the healthcare industry, 2024 felt like a year on unsteady ground.
At Collette Health, we are proud to remain focused on delivering virtual patient observation, virtual nursing, and virtual workforce augmentation solutions that support and empower those who are delivering care in the world today, especially those who are navigating changing conditions and attempting to do more with less. We continue to offer solutions that are trusted and reliable—one with straightforward pricing, continuous investment, and proven performance.
As both a software platform and a tech-enabled services organization, we work closely with our customers to create and deliver solutions for their unique challenges. Our platform offers flexible solutions for patient care; customers can use their own staff for virtual nursing and observation, supplement with our staff during peak times, or fully outsource patient observation to our team, effectively addressing the challenges of staffing shortages.
Unlike our competitors who rely on outsourcing, our +Staff team is comprised of full-time Collette Health employees, each averaging over 1,000 hours of direct patient observation experience, with our most seasoned team members logging thousands of hours. This service doesn’t just fill an empty chair—it brings the expertise of a team backed by years of platform development, clinical workflows, and proven patient safety outcomes.
Throughout 2024, we maintained our commitment to consistent virtual care platform evolution. We performed 17 scheduled cadence releases, occurring like clockwork every third Tuesday. In addition, we performed 24 additional silent patches, ensuring a high quality and stable experience. This predictable cadence ensures our customers always have access to the latest features and improvements without disruption. We take pride in delivering these enhancements—including new features and refinements—at no additional cost to our customers, all while maintaining zero platform downtime.
Here are the standout released features we delivered in 2024:
In-Application User Survey
Although this isn’t the most notable or marketable feature, it was one of our most important. From our company’s inception, user-centric design and user feedback has been paramount to us. We’ve long had a user feedback portal where the platform’s daily user’s corm could suggest features or vote on proposed enhancements, and we are immensely grateful for the hundreds of ideas that have been submitted, many of which have been incorporated into our products! However, this year, we expanded our user feedback by releasing an in-application user survey, which helps us monitor user sentiment to respond and adapt ourselves quickly. Through multiple feedback channels, including our user feedback portals, KLAS Research, and our customer success program, we maintain our users’ needs and build solutions that truly serve them.
Advancements in AI
In 2024, one could hardly cast a stone without encountering an article, blog post, or video addressing AI in some form. At Collette Health, we’ve thoughtfully integrated human-centered AI, machine learning, and smart algorithms throughout our platform—not as replacements for human expertise, but as applications that enhance our observers’ capabilities. We view AI as a digital superpower that amplifies human potential, always keeping the human element at the center of our approach.
Our AI-powered Observer Presence and Attention Detection have emerged as two of our most impactful features, providing supervisors with robust tools to monitor and ensure high-quality patient observation. Building on this foundation, in 2024, we introduced our ‘Follow Patient’ capability, an intelligent system that automatically tracks and maintains patient visibility by dynamically adjusting camera angles. Complementing these camera innovations, we also launched Smart Cropping, which intelligently frames the observer’s video feed to ensure consistent, professional patient interactions. Through these AI-powered automations, we’re eliminating routine technical adjustments so our observers can focus on what matters most—delivering attentive, high-quality patient care.
New Product Expansions
As our customers’ needs evolve, we continue to expand our platform capabilities to support them. In 2024, we introduced two significant virtual care platform expansions that address key healthcare delivery challenges.
Our new Position Monitoring feature helps prevent Hospital Acquired Pressure Injuries (HAPIs) by enabling observers to monitor patient activity and bed positions. This feature facilitates seamless coordination between bedside care teams and observation teams, allowing them to focus on specific physical areas that require attention.
We also launched Virtual Visits (initially introduced as ‘3rd party join’), a feature that dramatically expands the possibilities for remote care delivery. This capability allows virtual nurses, specialists, family members, and other members of the patient’s support system to join active observation sessions from any smartphone or laptop. What sets this feature apart is its interactive nature—participants can engage directly with both the patient and observer, creating a truly collaborative care environment. This flexibility opens numerous workflows, from family participation in care planning to remote specialist consultations.
Workflow Expansions
We continuously analyze how our customers use our platform, studying their current workflows and anticipated needs to identify opportunities for enhancement. In 2024, we implemented numerous workflow improvements—ranging from major features to subtle refinements—that significantly impact daily operations:
- Targeted Transfer: Enables observers and virtual nurses to transfer patients directly to specific users rather than returning them to a general queue, streamlining break coverage and post-consultation transitions.
- Tagging: Allows observers to mark significant moments for documentation while completing detailed notes at a more convenient time, maintaining timeline accuracy while providing workflow flexibility.
- Gallery View Engagement: Expanded patient interaction capabilities through our gallery interface, complemented by enhanced telephony features including extension dialing for improved bedside team communication.
- Warm Handoff: Ensures continuous patient monitoring during observer transitions, eliminating any gaps in video observation coverage.
Beyond these core workflow improvements, we’ve made significant technical advancements to our platform. Our Public API has seen increased adoption as a preferred method for EMR data integration. We’ve enhanced our reporting capabilities with expanded analytics, dashboards, and real-time metrics. Additionally, we successfully implemented a second video engine—a substantial technical achievement that further strengthens our platform’s capabilities.
These highlights represent just a selection of our 2024 virtual care platform enhancements, all of which are included at no additional cost to our customers!
2024 by the Numbers
- Observers on our platform have self-reported 108,378 falls avoided so far this year! This has an incredible impact on patient care and safety.
- 7,254 Good Catches are reported on average each month, representing a nearly 3x increase on the monthly average during 2023.
- Patients speaking 57 distinct languages were onboarded to our platform in 2024. While English (94.3%) and Spanish (4.3%) represent the speaking language of most of our patient population, we are proud to provide language options that ensure LEP (low English proficiency) patients receive the observation care they need without language barriers. In an interesting note, after mentioning the absence of Klingon speakers in last year’s review, we were surprised to verify that one patient this year was indeed onboarded with Klingon as their primary language!
- Our commitment to accessibility in patient inclusion criteria continues to strengthen, with significant growth in our support for hearing-impaired patients. In 2024, we observed a 32.7% increase in American Sign Language (ASL) usage compared to 2023, alongside a 33.5% increase in patients identified as hard of hearing.
- The gender distribution of our patient population remained stable compared to 2023, with male patients representing approximately 55% of those onboarded.
- Our in-application user survey program collected 4,610 responses in 2024, yielding an average score of 4.15 out of 5. We believe in both gathering and sharing this feedback, as it guides our development priorities and helps us understand user sentiment. We’re deeply grateful for this level of engagement from our users, and their feedback continues to shape the evolution of our platform.
What to Expect in 2025?
Our commitment to purposeful virtual care innovation will drive several significant developments in 2025. Our Virtual Nursing capabilities will expand significantly, featuring a dedicated interface and document-sharing functionality between nurses and patients. We’re also enhancing patient accessibility through new onboarding methods, including support for TVs and non-touch screens via mobile and remote options.
On the technology front, we’re developing new integrations and expanding our API capabilities. Our AI roadmap includes advanced features that further streamline workflows and enhance observation efficiency. A key addition will be our in-application Incident Report Management module, which will package existing platform data to better support adverse incident reviews. In addition, we’re introducing expanded monitoring tools for supervisors that will provide enhanced quality assurance capabilities and create more opportunities for observer coaching and development.
As we enter 2025, we remain focused on our core objective: empowering healthcare providers with reliable, innovative solutions that enhance patient care and safety and improve nursing efficiency. We look forward to continuing this journey alongside our customers, partners, and the dedicated healthcare professionals who trust in our platform every day.
Contact us to learn more about how we can support and empower your care teams.
