By Mollie R. Cummins

Introduction

What happens when nursing’s frontlines face a perfect storm of workforce shortages, high-acuity patients, and mounting pressure to deliver value-based care? According to the 2025 FutureCare Nursing survey by Wolters Kluwer Lippincott® Solutions, the answer is transformation. With 66% of nurse leaders planning to launch telehealth models, it’s clear: nursing is undergoing a digital transformation. Nurse leaders across the country are not only rethinking care models—they’re actively redesigning them. And increasingly, telehealth and virtual nursing are central to the shift.

For clinicians navigating this evolving landscape, the survey offers critical insights into how telehealth is being embraced to strengthen care delivery, ease burnout, and meet rising patient demands. Below, we unpack the findings and their implications for telehealth’s growing role in modern nursing practice.

Key Takeaways for Clinicians

• 66% of nurse leaders plan to launch telehealth nursing models—indicating strong momentum toward integrating virtual care into standard workflows.
• Value-based care and collaborative care models dominate current nursing strategy, with virtual and telehealth models gaining traction as essential extensions.
• Nurse informaticists and care coordinators are in demand to bridge the technology gap and support telehealth-enabled care transitions.
• Training nurses in financial metrics, behavioral health, and care transitions is now a strategic imperative to support virtual and hybrid models.

A System in Flux: Why Care Delivery Is Being Rebuilt

The FutureCare Nursing 2025 survey—based on feedback from 157 nurse leaders—paints a sobering picture: traditional nursing models are cracking under the weight of chronic staffing shortages and increased patient acuity. Sixty-five percent of chief nursing officers (CNOs) cited value-based care as a primary catalyst for change. With financial performance now tied to outcomes, nurse leaders are rethinking how care is delivered and measured.

Telehealth sits squarely in this transformation. The survey found that virtual care models, including both telehealth and virtual nursing, are seen not just as band-aids for staffing issues. Rather, they are tools that enable continuity across settings, reduce clinical burdens, and elevate nursing visibility in virtual workflows.. This aligns with industry-wide trends showing that remote monitoring, virtual consults, and post-discharge care are all becoming critical components of care continuity.

Telehealth and Virtual Nursing: From Pilot to Priority

While value-based care (87%), collaborative care (81%), and team-based nursing (74%) remain the dominant models in practice, the momentum behind telehealth (66%) and virtual nursing (66%) is striking. These models are not just ideas—they’re being actively developed and deployed.

Nurse leaders reported using telehealth in several key areas:

• Admission support and post-visit follow-up (e.g., virtual nurses handling documentation and patient education).
• Chronic disease management through home health models that leverage video visits.
• Behavioral health screening and early detection during virtual primary care sessions.
• Support roles for bedside RNs, reducing workload and increasing satisfaction.

Notably, organizations like Trinity Health and Providence are leading the way with hybrid team-based and virtual nursing models. Their success stories suggest that virtual care isn’t a future state—it’s a current necessity.

The Infrastructure Behind Telehealth Nursing

For telehealth models to succeed, the survey results underscored the importance of infrastructure—human and technological. The top emerging roles needed to support these shifts include:

• Nurse Informaticists (52%): Crucial for integrating data systems and ensuring interoperability.
• Care Coordinators (50%): Especially valuable in managing handoffs in hybrid or home-based care.
• Telehealth-trained RNs (47%): With growing virtual care programs, clinical acumen must be paired with digital fluency.

These findings mirror what many clinicians already experience: new models demand more than staffing—they require upskilling, communication protocols, and systems that support connected care.

What Is Nursing Informatics?

Nursing informatics is a specialty that blends clinical nursing practice with data science and information technology to improve patient outcomes and streamline care delivery. Nurse informaticists help design, implement, and evaluate digital systems—from electronic health records to remote monitoring platforms—that clinicians rely on every day. Despite its critical role, many nurses remain unfamiliar with this specialty because it’s not widely integrated into undergraduate nursing education, and informatics roles are often behind the scenes. As telehealth expands, nurse informaticists are becoming increasingly essential to ensure that digital tools align with clinical workflows and truly support frontline care.

Rewriting the Rules of Nursing Education

To support telehealth integration, nurse education must evolve. Surveyed leaders identified three urgent training priorities:

1. Understanding Financial and Outcomes-Based Metrics (62%): Nurses must grasp how their care impacts reimbursement, especially in risk-sharing environments.
2. Behavioral Health Screening Skills (54%): Critical for virtual visits where early cues may be harder to spot.
3. Effective Communication Across Transitions (43%): Especially important for telehealth, where warm handoffs can make or break patient outcomes.

In the WoltersKluwer report, Clinical Executive Bethany Robertson, DNP, CNM, stated, “training is the foundation of all workforce innovation efforts.” Without structured education in telehealth-specific competencies, innovation falters. Interestingly, education in nursing informatics is largely delivered through graduate programs and isn’t well-integrated into clinical nursing curricula. Clearly, nursing education must innovate to meet evolving nursing informatics workforce needs and ensure that nurses at all levels are prepared to engage in telehealth and virtual care.

Measuring What Matters: Progress Indicators for Virtual Models

Unlike traditional evaluation that focuses on cost and throughput, nurse leaders in the survey called for “progress indicators”—human-centered metrics that reveal how change is truly affecting staff and patients. These include:

• Reduced alert fatigue and bedside distractions (i.e., fewer call bells and alarms).
• Increased nurse satisfaction and reduced burnout.
• Clearer team communication and stronger role clarity.

In telehealth environments, these metrics help ensure that technology is an enabler—not a barrier—to better care. As one leader put it, the true measure of success is whether nurses feel more focused and supported, not simply whether costs declined.

Telehealth as a Retention Strategy

Perhaps the most surprising insight from the survey is this: telehealth may help solve the nurse retention crisis. By offloading repetitive or non-critical tasks to virtual nurses, organizations allow bedside nurses to spend more time on meaningful clinical care. This shift promotes:

• Greater autonomy and professional fulfillment.
• Opportunities for remote or hybrid work arrangements.
• Improved morale through tech-enabled collaboration.

Nurses at pilot sites described feeling “more supported” and “better able to learn about their patients” when virtual teams handled administrative tasks or supported documentation.

Conclusion

The FutureCare Nursing 2025 survey makes one thing abundantly clear: telehealth isn’t just an innovation—it’s now foundational to the future of nursing care delivery. Clinicians should take this as a cue to sharpen their digital skills, embrace new collaborative models, and advocate for systems that support whole-person care across settings. Additionally, informatics must be a strong priority in both clinical nursing education and specialty nursing education.

As health systems experiment and refine their strategies, those clinicians who adapt—and lead—will help shape a more sustainable, satisfying, and patient-centered future.