The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that were instituted to help control it have re-shaped every sector, and healthcare is no exception. But it isn’t only traditional providers and payers that have discovered the virtues of virtual care and are now exploring its best use cases.

New players that have been entering healthcare over the last few years – including big tech companies and big box retailers – have learned the same lessons, and are reshaping their care offerings toward what they’re calling an omnichannel approach, smartly combining in-person care, virtual care, care at home and care by mail.

At various sessions at the HLTH conference in Boston last week, they spoke about the need to meet consumers where they are in order to deliver valuable care.

“What I fundamentally believe is this: Too often I hear about how Americans just don’t engage in their health. That’s not the challenge of the individual, it’s a challenge of the system. If people aren’t engaging, you haven’t created the system to make them engage,” said Marcus Osbourne, SVP at Walmart Health. 

“These are people who do want to engage. They just don’t want to engage the way you want them to engage. So the omnichannel experience is about creating opportunities for them to engage the way they want to engage.”

Osborne spoke in a session with Dr. Sree Chaguturu, chief medical officer at CVS/Caremark. Both spoke about their own ventures into care at home and pharmacy delivery as part of an omnichannel approach that also includes virtual care.

“As we move into virtual care, we believe virtual care is a connection of virtual visits, plan design, and physical infrastructure, and you need that physical backstop, and that 10,000 retail locations across the country is a pretty compelling backstop,” Chaguturu said.

CVS has become a major hub for COVID-19 testing and vaccinations, Chaguturu said, which has helped the company refine its ability to scale in-person care offerings. The future will be about connecting the dots like those services, virtual visits and mail order services.

Osborne spoke about Walmart’s home delivery service for food, mentioning that he could see it forming the groundwork for a basic home care operation.

“When you start to go into people’s homes and you’re putting food into their refrigerators, the idea of doing one or two other services, those things become sort of obvious components of this to the home offering,” he said.

In another session, Dr. Vivian Lee, president of health systems at Verily, echoed Osborne’s comments.

“I feel like meeting patients where they are is what we’ve been missing in healthcare. People are people, and we need to meet them where they are, rather than typically in healthcare, giving them what we think is best for them,” she said.

Lee gave examples like Verily acquisition Onduo, which is using remote monitoring to cut down on the necessary visits for patients with diabetes, and a nonprofit Verily works with called 115, which is using telepsychiatry to help combat the opioid epidemic.

“For all of those individuals the challenge of having to get in your car and drive over for a visit is an enormous barrier to care,” she said. “So being able to offer the chatting and the coaching and the flexible, anytime, asynchronous, has been absolutely transformative to the access, to the delivery of care, and to the outcomes.”

Global head of Uber Health Caitlin Donovan said that, ultimately, all the ways of delivering care, from virtual to in-person, to remote monitoring, to prescription-delivery, will create efficiency and improve experience for the healthcare consumer.

“As we think about providing equitable access to healthcare, you need a lot of components and virtual care is a huge piece of that,” she said. “If you can meet people where they are and then manage by exception, rather than by rules, so you’re only bringing in those folks that really need that clinician’s visit, or meeting them in their home with a prescription delivery, a skilled or unskilled caregiver, I think you get a really efficient cost of care while still meeting people where they are.”

Osborne says he isn’t surprised that these nontraditional players are finding new ways to deliver care. “At our core, we didn’t start as healthcare companies,” he said. “But what we did start as is, we were all consumer companies. We were all trying to understand people’s fundamental needs and how to address them better than anyone else.”