What Is Possible If We Focus on Where Healthcare Is Going Instead of Where Medicine Has Been.

Abstract

As Canadian leaders of the world's largest virtual care organization, we bring a national and a global perspective to our response to Falk's (2022) paper on virtual care in Canada in this issue. With more than 20 years of experience enabling virtual care and more than 90 million people accessing our virtual care services and tools in more than 170 countries, across more than 600 health systems and more than 70 clinical use cases, we have already done or witnessed first-hand many of the changes that Falk anticipates Canadians will contend with as we expand channels to and modalities of care beyond the incumbent monochannel of in-person, physician-mediated service delivery. In this essay, we respond to Falk's (2022) paper in three ways: (1) we disagree with the definition of virtual care; (2) we agree with - and expand on - the analysis and ideas; and (3) we reveal two gaps in Falk's analysis that will or should be at the forefront of the Canadian discourse. That is, we disagree with the narrow framing of virtual care, we agree with the locks and keys (and suggest, from experience, other ways to think about the keys) and we table important gaps that are notably missing from the debate.