New Orleans-based Ochsner Health launched a virtual emergency department in October 2024 to address persistent overcrowding across its hospitals in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The model is part of a broader effort to centralize patient flow and coordinate care across the system’s more than 45 hospitals.
Lisa Fort, MD, assistant chief medical information officer for inpatient services and system medical director of the virtual care center at Ochsner, said the initiative stemmed from growing concern about emergency department utilization and limited access to preventive care in the Deep South.
“We were challenged by our executive team to think about an innovative way to be able to address that problem,” Dr. Fort said during an interview with the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.” “What we came up with was a virtual emergency department where we have a board-certified ED physician working with a navigator, and we do this seven days a week, 365 days a year.”
The virtual ED accepts escalations from Ochsner’s nurse call line, primary care clinics, urgent care centers and specialty clinics. Instead of automatically referring patients to the emergency department, the team evaluates whether care can be delivered virtually, redirected to a clinic, or coordinated through alternative follow-up.
“The first-year results were pretty exciting,” Dr. Fort said. “We saw more than 16,000 patients through that program, and we’re able to keep about 65% of them out of the emergency department and provide alternative care for them. We were also able to link about 82% of those patients to care so that they got their follow-up steps.”
Patients with clear emergencies, such as chest pain or stroke symptoms, are still directed immediately to the ED. The program focuses on patients in the middle — those who historically defaulted to the emergency room because other access points were unclear or unavailable. The virtual ED operates out of Ochsner’s virtual care center, which Dr. Fort described as a centralized command structure designed to monitor patients and deploy resources across the system. Further integration between the command center’s inpatient, outpatient and virtual reach is the next step.
“I think that as we look at 2026, it’s about how to bring all these things together so that we’re looking at it as a continuum of care for patients and not in little buckets,” Dr. Fort said.
That strategy includes improving transitions between outpatient, inpatient and post-acute settings and ensuring care teams are aligned when patients move across the system.
“To the patient, their care is going to be everything from when they see their doctor to how they manage their chronic disease, to how they take their medication, to how they communicate with the health system and not just their physician, but all the people that they interact with,” she said.
Longer term, Ochsner is evaluating how to use data and population-level insights to match patients to the right level of care earlier — particularly for chronic disease management and specialty referrals.
“Medicine’s been incredibly reactive historically and we need to be able to use these real assets that we see to create systems that are looking at the future and matching patients to the resources they need the most at the right time,” Dr. Fort said.
She views the virtual care center as the foundation for that model — an orchestration layer that helps guide patients across settings based on need, access and preference.
“How do we provide that orchestration layer and care traffic control to patients in a way that partners with them in a way that seems right because it’s not gonna be one size fits all to everybody,” she said.
