As Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health moved more of its hospitals onto similar technology platforms, leaders saw an opportunity to address nurse and provider shortages by using virtual care to make better use of limited resources at the bedside, in the home and in the clinic.
The effort began before the COVID-19 pandemic, and it accelerated as families were unable to visit hospitalized patients and others avoided hospitals unless they needed urgent care. CommonSpirit brought together experts who had already been using virtual care, including remote patient monitoring and virtual safety monitoring, to develop what would become Care Base, its virtual hospital.
“I would say what started it was having the ability to care for patients in a compassionate way and not have them be without their care team or their family when they most needed them,” said Gail Daly, RN, CommonSpirit’s system senior vice president of clinical operations integration and optimization, who launched the program.
Since launching in 2021, Care Base has expanded to support 452 CommonSpirit hospitals, clinics and home health branches across 19 states, according to the health system. The virtual hospital provides services ranging from 24/7 cardiac monitoring and after-hours triage to telehealth, virtual nursing, discharge support and AI-enhanced monitoring, generating $95 million in savings in fiscal 2026, according to CommonSpirit.
The initiative has also taken on a workforce development role, with more than 60 employees moving from Care Base into other healthcare careers since the program began. Most of the people CommonSpirit hires and trains for its Care Base teams are not licensed staff, Ms. Daly said, though some have gone on to become nurses or respiratory therapists or to work in medical coding.
“They came into these jobs and learned about healthcare and about patients,” she said. “They know what a code blue is and what a STEMI is, all of those things.”
For Ms. Daly, the workforce development opportunity is one of the most important lessons for other health systems considering a similar model, alongside the need for leadership support and early buy-in from bedside teams.
In an interview with Becker’s, she discussed what it took to scale Care Base, what she would have done differently and what other organizations should consider before building their own version.
Ms. Daly said Kathleen Sanford, DBA, RN, CommonSpirit’s chief nursing officer, began developing virtual care delivery concepts and patenting them years before Care Base launched. She also credited CEO Wright Lassiter III and his executive team with pushing the system to expand virtual care across acute, post-acute and ambulatory settings.
Ms. Daly said organizations that want to do this need leaders who are willing to look at the traditional care model differently and try to get patients home, where they have more resources and more say in their care. Without that kind of leadership, she said, it is harder to secure funding and resources.
“If you just dabble in it, that’s OK,” she said. “But if you really want to scale it to the degree that we have at CommonSpirit, it takes a lot of resources to support it. It’s not just one team. It’s multiple teams across the ministry that make it happen and come together to think about what’s possible.”
Given the pace of technological change, she also recommended developing a 10-year road map.
“What you put in yesterday, or even two hours ago, has probably changed by the time you blink,” she said.
Although CommonSpirit initially focused on technology adoption, including whether teams were ready for new tools and how to avoid alarm fatigue, Ms. Daly said the greater challenge became building trust among bedside staff, virtual care teams and patients’ families. The model required nurses, technicians and providers to accept support from care team members who were not physically present with the patient.
“We thought the technology was going to be the hard part, but after we really thought it through, it was kind of the easy part of it all,” she said. “It was really transforming the work culture and the acceptance of somebody who’s not physically in the room taking care of the patient. That was something we really had to work hard on, and we still do.”
Looking back, Ms. Daly said she would have embedded Care Base champions in every facility months before the technology went live, giving bedside staff more involvement in developing the program and allowing change management to begin earlier.
CommonSpirit has since taken other steps to strengthen the relationship between bedside and virtual teams. It delivers training in multiple formats, shares the names and faces of hub team members with bedside staff and holds morning safety huddles in some services so virtual staff can connect with the nurse caring for the patient. The system also developed competencies and training to help virtual staff make patients feel the team is right next to them, which Ms. Daly said made a significant difference in patient satisfaction.
Along with that training, she recommended that organizations complete a technical assessment and establish backup plans before launch, since unreliable technology can quickly undermine staff confidence in a new care model.
“If it’s not stable, the team doesn’t trust it,” she said. “Why should I adopt it if I can’t trust it?”
Among the results Ms. Daly highlighted were patient satisfaction rates exceeding 95% across CommonSpirit’s approximately 30 home-based remote monitoring programs, along with improvements in outcomes for mothers and babies through the system’s obstetric hypertension programs. In the Pacific Northwest, CommonSpirit said Care Base has sharply reduced readmissions for postpartum preeclampsia by allowing new mothers to monitor their blood pressure and receive medication adjustments at home.
Care Base also supports bedside teams through its virtual companion program, which uses remote monitoring to help prevent patient safety incidents. The service operates in more than 80 hospitals, Ms. Daly said, and allows virtual staff to intervene when patients attempt to get up alone and risk falling. CommonSpirit reported that the program prevented 187,900 adverse events in fiscal 2026, while Ms. Daly said bedside nurses have welcomed the additional support.
“Imagine the nurse who has his or her hands full with other assignments,” she said. “This is just another layer of support for them.”
Looking ahead, CommonSpirit plans to continue investing in AI-enhanced monitoring and technology that can remove tasks that do not require a clinical license from licensed staff, while expanding training for technicians in disease processes, prevention and managing complications of care. Ms. Daly said some virtual companions have already recognized changes in patients’ conditions and alerted nurses, helping prevent serious harm.
The system is also working to better integrate data between Care Base and its care settings to strengthen its ability to track outcomes.
Ms. Daly said Care Base’s continued growth also fits with broader changes underway at CommonSpirit, including plans to consolidate its five regions into three service areas, because the changes align with a direction leadership had already established.
For organizations considering their own clinical command centers, she recommended building workforce development into the model from the outset, rather than viewing the centers solely as a way to extend care or reduce workloads. She credited CommonSpirit’s education, HR and patient services teams with helping employees develop skills that can lead to other healthcare careers.
“We are actually growing people,” she said. “We’re introducing them to what it means to take care of a patient and to the complexities of healthcare, and they’re staying. They’re saying, ‘Hey, we like this. We want to do this.’ I think that’s going to save us as we advance technology.”
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