Demonstrating the Value of Virtual Nursing: Measurement Framework and Toolkit for Health Systems

Virtual nursing offers the promise of improving nurse satisfaction and workforce resiliency, better managing rising patient acuity, and reducing the administrative burdens of bedside care delivery. While early programs were often targeted at staffing relief, mature implementations demonstrate that virtual nursing is a care redesign strategy capable of delivering measurable impact across workforce stability, patient experience, quality outcomes, and cost performance.

Despite growing adoption, health systems have struggled to consistently measure the value of virtual nursing programs. Virtual nursing influences multiple aspects of care delivery simultaneously, and its impact is diffused across roles, units, and time horizons in ways that resist clean attribution through traditional performance metrics. As a result, many organizations lack a practical framework for evaluating these programs in a structured and credible way.

 addresses these challenges in measuring the impact of virtual nursing programs. It provides:

• A value framework organized around the Quadruple Aim—care team experience, patient experience, population health, and health care costs—with example key performance indicators (KPIs) for each domain.
• A measurement toolkit with step-by-step guidance on selecting KPIs, designing evaluation approaches, navigating data challenges, and using measured outcomes to drive program improvement.
• A measurement compendium (Appendix) of potential KPIs with recommended measurement approach to support programs at any stage of maturity.

The framework and toolkit are grounded in the implementation experience of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), a leading academic health system with extensive experience deploying virtual nursing across multiple hospital settings. The framework was further refined through structured discussions with nursing leaders and telehealth experts at peer academic medical centers to ensure the Quadruple Aim framework and related metrics reflect real-world implementation considerations across health systems.

This report is designed for health system leaders across acute care, multi-site, and emerging virtual workforce settings seeking to move beyond anecdotal evidence of virtual nursing’s value toward structured evaluation that can justify investment, guide program refinement, and support scaling to new units and care settings.

Read the report .