In another special episode recorded live from the floor of the HLTH 2025 conference, Dr. Tim Showalter sits down with Jacob Hansen, Chief Product and Technology Officer of AvaSure.
AvaSure is a leader in intelligent virtual care, powering over 5,000 deployments in 1,100 hospitals with its virtual sitting and nursing platform. Jacob discusses how AvaSure's unique, nurse-centric approach to product design (15% of their team are nurses) is critical to building technology that clinicians actually trust and use.
In this conversation, Jacob unveils major new partnerships with Suki, to integrate ambient clinical documentation, and Verizon, to leverage private 5G for rapid, reliable deployment in hospitals. He shares how AvaSure is tackling healthcare's biggest challenges—patient safety, workforce productivity, and clinician burnout—and "bringing the joy back to the bedside."
Tune in to hear how AvaSure is delivering millions in financial value, reducing staff attrition, and leveraging its massive data asset to prove clinical efficacy. Finally, Jacob shares his vision for the future of in-hospital care: the rise of "agentic AI" that moves beyond simple models to create true, outcome-driven solutions.
Introduction
Dr. Tim Showalter: Welcome to HealthTech Remedy. This is another special episode of an interview from the HLTH 2025 Conference. We're exploring how technology, data, and leadership are transforming patient care. I'm really excited for this interview with Jacob Hansen, Chief Product and Technology Officer of AvaSure. And part of the fun of HLTH is getting to have these interactions.
AvaSure, for those who aren't aware of it, is an intelligent virtual care platform that helps hospitals engage with patients, optimize staffing, and seamlessly blend both remote and in-person care at scale. AvaSure partners with over 1,100 hospitals and has powered more than 5,000 deployments across the U.S. And AvaSure has become synonymous with virtual sitting and virtual nursing, using AI, connected devices, and a highly trained clinical team to keep patients safe and staff supported.
What's really interesting to me is that 15% of the AvaSure team are nurses, which says a lot about how deeply they're embedded in real-world care delivery. As I said today, we are excited to be joined by Jacob Hansen, Chief Product and Technology Officer. Jacob, welcome to HealthTech Remedy. It's great to have you with us at HLTH.
Jacob Hansen: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Dr. Tim Showalter: It's great to connect with you here live at HLTH. This is a different format for us, so I'm really looking forward to capturing a lot of the momentum from HLTH and hearing about what AvaSure is up to. I'd like to first, before we hop in to talk about AvaSure as a company, would love to hear your background, career story, and all the experiences that led up to your role at AvaSure.
From Health Tech Strategist to AvaSure's CPO: Jacob Hansen's Journey
Jacob Hansen: Happy to share. I've been in health tech for not quite 20 years now, and my background has primarily been in product-focused roles and strategy, really listening to the market, identifying pains and challenges that mostly clinical users faced. Clinical data, population health, clinical trials, and now with AvaSure, virtual care platforms.
Dr. Tim Showalter: And I know that AvaSure is having a big week here at HLTH. There are some partnership announcements. Can you share those with us?
Forging Strategic Partnerships: AvaSure's Collaboration with Suki and Verizon
Jacob Hansen: We have been really excited to be here with a couple of partners. One of them is a partnership focused on Suki. As a virtual care platform, we facilitate both continuous observation and episodic interactions for remote caregivers with patients, primarily in inpatient acute settings. Whether it's a hospitalist who's rounding or some specialist who's having a post-surgical interaction, a virtual nurse, we embed a button in our user interface that allows initiating ambient clinical documentation with Suki so that that can be captured and sent into flow sheets or whatever inside of the EHR. We see that as a huge opportunity for workforce productivity, doing all the things that we expect digital scribes and AI-driven scribes to do. That's one.
And then the other one is with Verizon. With Verizon, our endpoints in rooms require power and data. When you're trying to go live in a new hospital and you think about running cables in cinder block walls and steel frame construction and all the challenges of old hospitals, by working with Verizon and their private 5G network, we can mount a new endpoint to the top of a TV with dual sensors, microphone speakers, and hook it into that private 5G network. We can be live really quickly with a secure, dedicated broadband connection that allows you to go from zero to time to value really quickly with our solution. It's pretty exciting.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Those are great partnerships and opportunities to move the field forward. And just to reflect on that, you're really solving for two of the biggest challenges for healthcare right now. Connectivity is one of them, which you've really addressed. And then the other is clinician burnout and streamlining the workflow. This touches physicians, nurses, and all care providers. And it's really remarkable to see you do that.
But I've read somewhere, I wanted to touch a little bit about the AvaSure connection with nurses. I've read somewhere that something like 15% of the team is made up of nurses, which I think is pretty unique in a health technology company. And I know it's solving for a lot of challenges with respect to nurse staffing within the U.S. healthcare system. How does the nursing workforce at AvaSure show up with respect to its approach to product design and implementation and the clinical nuance for products?
The Clinical Core: How Nurses Shape AvaSure's Product and Implementation
Jacob Hansen: You jumped right into the two areas where it matters most. First and foremost, in tech, in health tech especially, we've seen a lot of trends come and go—some new flavor of the week with exciting tech that's going to make all the difference in the world. But it's in clinical change that that technology actually creates value for health systems where they're not implementing something. I can't tell you the number of times I've been in a hospital room and there's some shelfware that's sitting there. It's doing nothing.
It's the clinical members of our team that give life to what we've created. We have to have that as part of our organization. And these are people who worked a couple of decades in many cases in critical care units in a hospital. So they really help shape the way our product is adopted and used. And to your point, you asked about it and how it shapes product development as well. Our teams and our customer-facing teams, especially where we have so many customers—1,200 rooftops to be exact right now—it's those teams that are in the trenches with our customers that are receiving actionable advice. It's critical that we listen to them and that we use that feedback to shape feature development and changes to existing features and then new products that we create as well.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Great. And just for our listeners, could you give a little more color to who are your main customers and what is the value proposition that AvaSure offers them?
AvaSure's Value Proposition: Enhancing Patient Safety and Workforce Productivity
Jacob Hansen: I'll start with the value prop first. We aim at three specific things. First is the safety of patients and their caregivers. Think about protecting against adverse events, workplace violence, things like that. Second is workforce productivity. So trying to remove manual work from the clinical team so that they can operate at top of license and do the things they need to do at the right time. And then last is extending caregiver reach. How do we take specialists or care team members who need to be interacting with patients in a variety of places and extend their connection there? Those are the three value propositions that we're primarily dedicated to.
Now, how do we do that? We're a combination of physical endpoints, hardware and software, and artificial intelligence that can facilitate each of those value propositions by offering up a platform with four core things that sit on top. I've mentioned a couple of them. Continuous observation, which is an application augmented by AI that watches for falls and elopements. Episodic, which facilitates teleconsult-style interactions. A virtual care assistant, so it's a digital assistant like consumers use in their homes, but with hospital-oriented context. We developed that with NVIDIA and Oracle. And then fourth is our environmental sensing suite. It's computer vision AI. And this goes back to the workforce productivity value proposition, watching for things like room readiness for an admit or has nutrition been delivered to a diabetic patient? Has a patient moved adequately, ambulated in the room enough to get ready for discharge? Things like that.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's amazing. And I can see a lot of these pain points for how we're going to make our healthcare force safer and how we're going to leverage the talent and the size of the workforce that we do have. These are health system-level challenges that you're taking on, which is remarkable. Can you give us a sense of either the broad results you're seeing so far for your customers or even some of the stories you're hearing from nurses either outside of the company or within the company or even healthcare administrators within your customers?
The ROI of Virtual Care: Reducing Attrition and Delivering Financial Value
Jacob Hansen: I think I may have mentioned it already, but we're deployed in approximately 1,200 hospitals in the U.S. Out of 5,000 or 5,500, depending on how you count them, a pretty significant number, over half of the health systems in the United States.
And the core things we see are, number one, the significant influence that these offerings have on attrition. On the nursing side, turnover in 2024 was at 16%. Every time you have to replace a nurse, that's $61,000-ish just to replace them. It's really our job to empower them so that they don't feel this tug to go do something else.
We use this term a lot. It's really driven by our chief clinical officer, Lisbeth Votruba. She talks about bringing joy back to the bedside. We can only do that if we allow them to do the clinical things that matter by stripping out all of the chasing paper or blankets or pillows or what have you so that they can do pain reassessments, so that they can be focused on patient interaction and patient care.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's remarkable. And I love the promise of technology to bring the joy back. It's one of the most exciting things to see for AI and in broad use of technology as a practicing clinician. Things are unnecessarily so hard. And it's great to see you building in that space.
Jacob Hansen: And you asked about what we're hearing in terms of results. I didn't do a good job of getting specific. We can deliver millions of dollars of value back to the health system by focusing on optimizing something that costs $30 an hour, like a one-to-one sitting, and replacing it with virtual sitting at $2 an hour.
We can deliver value back in leakage and keepage, network management exercises by supporting specialty physicians and connecting with patients in rural areas that might have gone out of network. There are really powerful business cases there. And that's just the important financial side of an ROI that adds on top of the, I'm going to call them secondary or softer, ROI elements of bringing joy back, preventing attrition, and driving down length of stay—those types of outcomes.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Great. And I see from the healthcare administrator side and from the clinician side, be it doctors and nurses, there's real value-add there. I'm curious how you're addressing the challenges that, say, a CMIO might face, thinking about cybersecurity, IT governance, reliability. How are you thinking through those and helping to make sure that those concerns are addressed?
Addressing CMIO Concerns: Data, Security, and IT Governance
Jacob Hansen: Great question. I agree. I think it's fascinating to see the way that buyer and user personas are ever-shifting in this space. For a long time, our core buyers were nursing directors, then it was CNOs, then it was CNEs, then it was CNEs plus CNIOs. Now, because we support physicians, it's CMIOs and on the informatics side.
Whether it's CHIO, CMIO, et cetera, there are a couple of things that come to mind. One is the importance of data in supporting change and measuring outcomes. We have a centrally stored, fully benchmarked national data asset that we are really proud of. Across our whole base, we're capturing system performance and utilization details that we can do a lot with. We can see, oh, hey, a call happened here. The reason for the call was this. It lasted this long. These calls typically last this long at this time of day. If they happen at this other time of day, they are optimized and improved. Here are the types of roles that are performing best in these interactions.
And then the same on continuous observation. Why was this patient being monitored? For this type of monitoring, how many times did somebody have to verbally intervene? Did we have to sound a stat alarm? We have all of that data stored. So there's real power in what we can do with informatics-focused leaders using data like that. And then on the security side, the big ask we get these days is really just aligning to industry standards. How do we alleviate concerns by demonstrating compliance with these industry-leading things like SOC 2 and other requirements like that?
Dr. Tim Showalter: Fantastic. And I hadn't really thought about all the data that you're generating and how that can be a real strength moving forward. Can you give us some more examples for how you're using the data resource that you're generating? I'm thinking here, is it helping to improve your products overall? And are there more specific use cases where maybe hospital customers have used it to inform some of their quality metrics?
Leveraging Data to Drive Adoption and Prove Clinical Efficacy
Jacob Hansen: I would say the most important way that the data is being used now is to drive adoption and ROI for our customers. We have this customer success team. It's actually got a number of those clinicians we spoke about earlier who are part of that team. And they're empowered with that data to go and work with our customers shoulder to shoulder to say, hey, here's what we see in the data.
And based on that, here are ways that we can optimize your experience with the product. For health systems that are, let's say they're starting in a couple of units and they want to expand to a building and then a campus and then a system, the only way to justify that cost is with evidence, is with proof points. And the data is where you're going to find that.
We know that we have to support our health system partners with that data. It's actually one of the reasons we are very supportive of spending money on clinical evidence and clinical study. We're actually in two clinical studies now that focus on the impact of artificial intelligence augmentation on virtual safety attendance. How many more patients can somebody watch beyond the average in the market of around 1-to-12? Can they go from 1-to-12 to 18 to 24 to 36? And how do we prove that with clinical evidence? Because it's one thing to show the proof points in our data, but if it's a clinical study, think about the trust that generates for bedside clinicians who need to trust these tools as they use them.
Dr. Tim Showalter: It's remarkable. It's really solving for a scaling problem and a population health problem that a lot of health systems face. I know we only have a few minutes left, so I would love to take a small pivot to looking ahead to the future overall. We started this off hearing about your career, 20-plus years in health technology. And I'd like to get your thoughts on what you're foreseeing for the next, say, three to five years. I know things are moving really quickly now with AI and with technology. What do you see for the future vision of virtual care inside hospitals? The work that you're involved in and adjacent spaces, what does that look like?
The Future of In-Hospital Virtual Care: The Rise of Agentic AI
Jacob Hansen: It's a really good question. A couple of things I am really, really excited about and anxious to help deliver on in this space. The first one is, it's one thing to create a model. Let's take the example of computer vision. It's one thing to create a model that does something simple, like watching how many degrees a patient has turned in their bed. It's another thing to take that model and models focused on the patient, the bed, anomaly detection for other things that they're leaning on, acuity scores tied to pressure injury risk, and to take all that data and then to create an actual solution—not just a model, but an outcome that leads to more compelling action for clinicians.
You walk around here at HLTH, AI is in every booth. Everybody has a model for something. But how is that model part of a bigger story that attacks a very clear clinical challenge? And then the second thing is sitting between these solutions or these models, is the power of agentic AI. I know that's a bit of a buzzword, but the reality is we have an opportunity to say, okay, we can see a lot happening in a room. We have a digital assistant, a virtual care assistant that can talk to the patient. We have data about system utilization. How do these things fundamentally change the way we interact with the patient without having to bother clinicians with seeking permission for the computers to do what they can do alongside clinical care?
And that's really the change that we're excited about. If computer vision sees a patient is agitated, is moving uncomfortably in the bed, and we also know they haven't been to the bathroom in a while, and we happen to know that this patient has a catheter, pick your clinical background story, what would a virtual care assistant then do automatically because an agent says, ah, I've seen these things, it's reported back to me, now I'm going to say to this other model over here, hey, will you check in with the patient on fill in the blank? That's what we're really excited about.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah, that's a great vision. And ultimately from a patient perspective, all of these tools and connecting the technology as you described, that only improves the quality of care overall and in terms of making sure that safe care is delivered, but it makes it faster, too, which has real advantages and scalability. Maybe just to close with one more general question for you, since you've been in this health technology space for so long. What career advice might you have for a listener who maybe hasn't had the chance to be here at HLTH and walk around the floors and see the excitement about finding an opportunity to make an impact and really improve healthcare for people with technology?
Career Advice: Finding Your Passion in Health Technology
Jacob Hansen: That's a great question. The first thing I would say is start with a problem that you're passionate about—and note the word "problem." Don't start with technology you're passionate about. Start with, especially if somebody's coming from a clinical background or if they've been in healthcare but they're not in tech, what challenges do you see that you really have experience with and that you feel fire about.
And then second is create opportunity. There are so many people who've been in this industry a long time, and it's a bit incestuous. I walk around here and I see people I've known for a lot of years, and we keep bumping into each other. That's just the nature of it. Everybody that's here that's been in this space a long time, we're all anxious to give back because we were supported by somebody. For somebody who's wanting to get into this side of the healthcare space, the technology side, I would say network like crazy. Find those things you're passionate about. Connect with people who work in that arena because they're excited to give back.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Fantastic. That's great advice. Well, Jacob, it's been a fantastic conversation. I love hearing about what you're up to with AvaSure and about your perspective on technology trends. Thanks for joining us on HealthTech Remedy.
Jacob Hansen: Thanks so much for having me.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's it for this episode of HealthTech Remedy, presenting live recordings from the HLTH 2025 conference. Really great having the chance to sit down with Jacob from AvaSure. Please be sure to like and subscribe and leave reviews for these episodes on your favorite podcast platform. Your support and reviews are really critical to us continuing to do the work that we do.
