Key Takeaways
- Telehealth must be treated as a permanent pillar of care delivery by investing in infrastructure that supports home-based models and remote specialist access.
Telehealth is no longer a side project in U.S. healthcare—it’s rapidly evolving into a permanent, high-stakes battleground for access, efficiency, and patient trust. COVID-19 forced open the doors, but the question now is: how do leading health systems build on this momentum to transform care? In this exclusive interview for The American Journal of Healthcare Strategy, Amy Wright, MS, RN—Director of Clinical Operations for Urgent Care, Telehealth & Access at Jefferson Health—shares how her frontline leadership is shaping the next phase of virtual care delivery.
Drawing from her unique journey from 911 EMT to nurse leader and now telehealth executive, Amy offers candid reflections on patient experience, staff culture, and what healthcare must get right for telehealth to truly deliver. If you care about quality, access, or the future of U.S. healthcare operations, this is a conversation worth your time.
Amy Wright became a healthcare administrator to impact more patients and improve care system-wide. As she put it:
“In my own little patient assignment in the emergency department, I knew I could provide great care for the patients and the families... but there was an entire emergency department of patients that needed to have that same care provided. For me, stepping into a leadership role was a way that I could start coaching and mentoring and have some influence over other teams.”
This transition is common among nurse leaders, but Amy’s motivation was not about moving away from patient care—it was about scaling it. She recognized that system-level decisions about staffing, flow, and access ultimately shape the consistency and quality of patient experiences.
Key takeaways for healthcare leaders:
Leadership enables clinicians to scale their impact far beyond the bedside.
Consistency in care is best achieved when administrative and clinical priorities are aligned.
Coaching, mentoring, and supporting frontline staff are core administrative functions—not afterthoughts.
Amy Wright’s background in emergency medicine taught her to deliver calm, empathetic care—skills that directly inform her approach to telehealth.
She explained, “I liked the idea of being able to be with patients very quickly, stabilizing them, figuring out what the issue was... and then getting them to the definitive care they needed.”
Amy’s prehospital experience as a 911 EMT, followed by her emergency department roles, shaped her focus on:
Rapid triage and stabilization
Clear, calm communication during high-stress moments
Transitioning patients smoothly to the next level of care, whether at home or in the hospital
Her move from ambulances to the emergency room, and eventually to leadership, reflects a broader trend: emergency clinicians are well-suited to drive innovation in telehealth, where decisive action and empathy are equally vital.
Implications for telehealth programs:
Recruit leaders who understand the full patient journey—from home to hospital and back.
Embed emergency medicine’s adaptability and communication style in telehealth protocols.
Prioritize cross-training: those who’ve worked both “outdoors” (prehospital) and “indoors” (clinical) bring unique system-wide insight.
Patient experience isn’t “fluff”—it’s foundational, and begins with meeting basic human needs. Amy draws on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to ground her approach:
“When they come through the door, they are a human, they have basic needs—they want to be warm, they want to feel safe, they want to be given food and shelter and taken care of... That’s going to increase their anxiety. So it’s our job to make sure that we’re addressing those basic needs.”
Amy shared how her stint as an ED Patient Experience Coordinator deepened her respect for this principle. In her words, “I really got to see how much of the control piece and those basic needs were driving the frustrations that patients were feeling. It was driving the conflict and the complaints that we were seeing.”
Practical steps for leaders:
Acknowledge that every patient encounter is unique and potentially life-altering for the individual, regardless of clinical severity.
Train staff to overcommunicate: Patients want to understand “the why” and “what’s next.”
Reduce anxiety by giving patients as much control and comfort as possible in unfamiliar settings.
What to avoid:
Don’t assume patient complaints are about clinical care alone; unmet basic needs often underlie dissatisfaction.
Empathy and communication top the list, and these are skills honed over time—not just learned in school.
Amy told us, “Every interaction that you have with a patient, regardless of whether you’re a student or a licensed clinician, you have the opportunity to learn something... Reminding ourselves that it’s the first time in some cases that those patients are hearing it and it’s the words they need to hear in order to be calm and to trust you.”
Her perspective reframes provider training:
Empathy isn’t “nice-to-have”—it’s a core competency for patient safety and compliance.
Communication must be proactive and repetitive, even if it feels excessive to staff.
Providers must approach every patient as a new experience and avoid letting frustration from prior encounters influence care.
Checklist for frontline leaders:
Model calm, patient, and empathetic interactions during all team meetings and huddles.
Encourage self-reflection and peer feedback on communication styles.
Normalize overcommunicating with patients—clarity reduces anxiety and complaints.
Amy Wright was a self-described “giant skeptic” of telehealth, especially at the start of COVID-19.
She openly shared, “Some of the thoughts were, you know, are the doctors just afraid of the COVID virus? So they’re afraid to go into the rooms and they’re avoiding those types of patients... That it was a shortcut, that again, the care wasn’t the same.”
Her skepticism was rooted in the perception that virtual care was:
A workaround for provider safety concerns, not a true substitute for in-person care
Rushed into practice without sufficient culture change or staff education
At risk of eroding the quality of physical assessment
How did she change her mind?
First-hand experience: “Jumping into it and seeing how my clinical brain and my skepticism can help maybe turn the tides of the feelings towards telehealth.”
Observing highly skilled clinicians conduct comprehensive assessments virtually, with or without physical touch, supported by trained staff at the patient’s location
Realizing telehealth is not “lesser care”—it’s the same standards, delivered differently
Lesson for executive leaders:
Expect skepticism among your clinical teams. Address it head-on with education, exposure, and peer champions—skeptics often become your best telehealth advocates.
Telehealth isn’t going away—it’s becoming a pillar of modern healthcare, especially for patients with mobility challenges or those far from major centers.
Amy is optimistic: “The future is so bright. The fact that we have the ability to take care and provide it in patients’ homes, I think, is one of the biggest game changers.”
She outlined where the sector is headed:
Home-based care will become standard for many conditions, with hospital stays reserved for high-acuity patients.
Telehealth will be used for:
Streamlining care transitions
Involving family members remotely in clinical conversations
Consulting with subspecialists in real time (e.g., neurologists for stroke care)
Improved outcomes, higher quality, and better patient safety will result from “improving access to outstanding care that our patients are getting.”
For U.S. health systems, the call to action is clear:
Invest in telehealth infrastructure and workflows.
Create partnerships that extend care beyond traditional hospital walls.
Train clinicians to excel at “webside” manner, not just bedside care.
Amy Wright believes AI will streamline workflows, but human touch remains irreplaceable.
She stated, “There is such a human factor in healthcare... that’s never going to be replaced by AI. But I think what AI will be able to do for us in the future is make things more efficient.”
AI’s best applications, according to Amy:
Automating administrative tasks that sap clinician time and attention
Surfacing data to inform real-time decision-making
Enabling providers to spend more time face-to-face with patients
For executive teams:
Invest in AI that enhances—not replaces—human care.
Pilot new technology with an eye toward efficiency and provider satisfaction.
Expect that adoption will depend on clear communication and support for frontline staff.
Patients’ expectations have shifted post-COVID, and not always for the better. Compassion is needed on both sides of the interaction.
Amy observed, “People are—patients even—less compassionate towards the teams that are doing the work and are a little bit more short with them, get frustrated more easily... that just creates this wall that goes up with our healthcare providers and we don’t want to be defensive with our patients.”
Her advice for providers:
Don’t let previous negative encounters shape how you treat the next patient.
Remember, every patient is an opportunity to impact not just an individual, but their community.
“One person impacts way more and we have the opportunity to make it a better experience for them.”
Patient-centered reminders:
Healthcare professionals are navigating immense change—patience and empathy go both ways.
Every interaction is a chance to rebuild trust and foster better care.
Amy Wright’s journey—from EMT to nurse, to director of telehealth at Jefferson Health—underscores the need for humility, adaptability, and open communication.
To drive successful telehealth transformation:
Cultivate leaders with clinical experience and administrative vision.
Treat patient experience as a core operational metric.
Tackle skepticism by empowering clinical skeptics as telehealth champions.
Invest in technology that enables, not replaces, human care.
The next wave of telehealth will not just be about video visits, but about integrating virtual, in-person, and home-based care into a seamless experience for patients and families.
Telehealth’s future will be built by those who combine bedside compassion, operational rigor, and a willingness to challenge assumptions. As Amy Wright, MS, RN, put it, “We have the opportunity to make it a better experience for them.” Whether you lead a health system, run clinical operations, or are a student preparing for a healthcare career, the call to action is the same: double down on empathy, communication, and continuous learning as we navigate this next era of healthcare transformation.
<p>hello and welcome back to the American Journal of hellc care strategy I'm joined here today with Amy Reit uh Amy how are you doing today I'm great how are you I'm doing fantastic can you can you tell me a little bit about yourself yeah so I'm Amy right I am a nurse by background um with a um uh background in emergency medicine and nursing leadership I currently am a director of clinical operations for uh Jefferson Health in the telea health and Urgent Care realm and if I'm correct you uh started off as a nurse I did I did so my background is nursing and that's really where my passion lies at this point um starting out just as a brand new nurse at the bedside it was really about um being there for the patients impacting their care making sure that they had great outcomes uh during their visits um and that they had the consistent care regardless of when you walked in or what department you walked into that was really what I um what I really wanted to see for every patient and that has continued throughout my career um whether it's been from a nursing perspective or an administrative side I really just wanted to see the best outcomes for our patients what inspired you to sort of transition from the clinical side to the administrative side it was all about uh how many patients we could reach uh I in my own little patient assignment in the emergency department I knew that I could provide great care um for the patients and the families the four or five that I got to have at a time but there was an entire emergency department of patients that needed to have that same care uh provided and for me stepping into a leadership role was a way that I could start coaching and mentoring and have some some influence over other teams to make sure that they were they were after the same goals which was those patients right there's many uh there's many very skilled clinical staff and usually they focus on one family at a time or one patient at a time from an administrative point I guess you could sort of have an impact in how many patients entered a clinic and coordinate their whole flow from entry to exit so I think uh that's really fantastic I think administr yeah and we still always want them to focus on one patient and one family at a time but if we have the right complement of staff and we have the right support staff we can make sure that every person that walks in is still getting that one patient at a time treatment and what inspired you to go to emergency medicine was this always a goal from the start or did you sort of transition into it it absolutely was um so I was a little late to go to nursing school and while I was trying to to figure out exactly where I wanted to be I did work um as a 911 um EMT so uh emergency medicine was what I was comfortable with I liked the idea of being able to be with patients very quickly stabilizing them figuring out what the issue was what was going on with them and then getting them to the definitive care that they needed so many times it was about getting to a patient who was not feeling well helping them feel better and then sending them home while in other cases it was you know taking care of the patient and then sending them to the inpatient side of the hospital or sending them for additional treatment at another facility you mentioned you were uh EMT before you went into nursing was it a huge switch from going from the outdoors in an ambulance to sort of like an indoor setting for you to practice Health yeah yeah the emergency department was definitely more of a controlled situation than it was either in a patient's home or in the back of the ambulance I can tell you that once I had my job in the emergency department I kind of closed that chapter of my life of the prehospital medicine piece and really focused on uh the inhospital care since you were able to work both in the outdoor side and the indoor side and you were able to see the patients from immediately after trauma to being treated an emergency room to referring them to impatient what do you think as an indust that what what can we do to sort of improve this patient care from the start to the beginning from the start to that's a great question that's a that's a really great great question um it's all about focusing on the patient um you are going to meet people in all kinds of different scenarios and I had a colleague of mine um say to me one day like it's our job to be the best part of somebody's worst day uh and that really could not be um closer to the truth regardless of the situation regardless of a life-threatening situation versus a sprained ankle this is an emergency for someone um it is life altering for them it is a scary situation to be in so you as the first person that they're coming in contact with being calm being able to walk them through what to expect and and being empathetic towards their situation whether you perceive it to be an emergency or not um is the only way to meet the patient where they're at and be able to walk them through the rest of their journey and these skills you mentioned being empathetic being calm uh being patient with these patients is it something that you were able to learn while going through school or is this something that you develop over time yeah I think you know every interaction that you have with a patient regardless of whether you're a student or um you know a licensed clinician you have the opportunity to learn something from the patients that you're talking to um and falling back into the foundation of masa's hierarchy of needs um being able to just provide that foundational support for somebody when they come through the door they are a human they have basic needs they want to be warm they want to feel safe they want to be given food and shelter and taken care of and you know we strip them of so many of those foundational things and make them you know take take them out of their comfort zone and that's going to increase their anxiety so it's our job um to make sure that we're addressing those basic needs to keep them C to make them feel like they have some control over the situation and be able to keep them comfortable while we're waiting for those definitive diagnoses you mentioned maso's hierarchy of needs a few times in our previous conversation is this something that you feel everyone every health care practice should focus on and sort of keep it in mind when meeting a patient so it was something that made sense for me um you know patient experience is a huge piece of what we do and I feel like many healthc care providers feel that patients are coming to them for help um and that um patient experience sometimes is a whole lot of fluff um I had the opportunity to spend a couple of years as um an ed patient experience coordinator um in an emergency department and I really got to see how much of the the control piece and those basic needs were driving um the frustrations that patients were feeling it was driving the conflict and the complaints that we were seeing so I feel like as a clinician uh or anybody that's interacting with patients it's your job to figure out what clicks for you if it's you know maslows that make sense to your brain and you can say you know these are the things that I need to focus on in order to have a really smooth patient visit then that works if you want to go to you know some some tips and tricks from patient experience advisors within hospitals um it really really is based on how your brain works and what makes the most sense ultimately we have to meet the patients where they are and we have to provide them care and if we don't do that in such a way that makes them feel more comfortable and creates that trust between you and them it's going to be a bumpy visit and that's what we want to avoid what what are some uh qualities of a provider do you commonly see that sort of aren't right when interacting with a patient who's definitely going through a tough time I'm sure you know as a working in emergency room what are some of the qualities notice I would never say that any of their qualities aren't right um I don't think that anybody comes to their job or to a patient room thinking I'm just going to be a total jerk to this person I think that it's you know communication is always the number one thing that patients want they want to understand the why they want to understand what the next steps are and for so many clinicians that is so common place for us that it runs on repeat in our brain constantly but we we we don't say it enough so even if we feel like we're overc communicating or we're saying the same thing over and over in our visits to our patients throughout the day reminding ourselves that it's the first time in some cases that those patients are hearing it and it's the words that they need to hear in order to be calm and to trust you and to comply with whatever your treatment plan is for them you have a background in tella health is that correct yeah tellah health is my new adventure um that I'm very excited about um my my basis for moving into this role it was covid um working in an emergency department or a hospital um during covid we saw the rise of telea Health you know visits that are were being being done by the primary care doctors Specialists that were you know we called it zooming in at that point or whatever platforms everybody was using and it it it didn't feel right and it wasn't that it didn't feel right for any other reason that our culture was not ready or hadn't been explained how this this tella Health piece worked it's no different than regular care and I think that that's where the hangup was um was the the perception and maybe not having enough information that you know these doctors were were really skilled at how to assess people whether or not they were putting a stethoscope on them or whether they had somebody that was assisting them in the room to put a stethoscope on them or help them with their exam the care is the same um it's just done in a different way and I think that that is the biggest barrier right now and that's my goal for the position that I'm in right now having been a giant skeptic of tella health and not knowing how much was out there um really jumping into it and seeing how my clinical brain and my skepticism can help maybe turn the tides of the the feelings towards teleah Health now what were your thoughts when you were skeptical of tahal what what were some ideas that were going through your mind so you know some of the thoughts thoughts were you know are the doctors just afraid of the co virus so they're afraid to go into the rooms and they're avoiding those types of patients I had heard that all over the place um you know this doctor doesn't want to go in and see the patient so they're just asking us to go into the room and set the patient up with their their laptop um or their iPad or whatever whatever they were using that it was a shortcut that again the care wasn't the same and that was that was one of the biggest misconceptions that you know I think everybody felt just with the speed of which it came out what what what do you see as a future of healthcare technology definitely tellah health will probably stick around is very convenient for patients who say live far away you know are in an age where it's hard to move from place to place what what are some other ideas you have where you can see Healthcare using in future the future is so bright the fact that we have the ability to take um care and provide it in patients homes um I think is one of the biggest game changers um the the changing tides of you know being able to Pro provide that care at home and then how do we then create an environment in the hospital where you're only there if you need to be there um I think that's going to be really different and it's also going to probably increase the Acuity of the patients that we see in the hospital um but with that being said you know we'll have the ability to get a dock on and you know con with another physician regarding the patient that's in front of them or the the complex situation that a patient may be in it it's really whatever people dream it to be like if the if the bedside teams can open their minds and say you know I think that we have a great chance of using telea health to streamline our efficiencies and to make sure that we can get the patients family um on the line when we're seeing them or get the top neurologist to see this patient to help us rule out stroke it's only going to improve the access to outstanding care that our patients are getting and then lead to better outcomes um more quality Care better safety of our patients uh and I think that that's really where the the priority is right now yeah that's very interesting I agree with you the future is very bright um especially with all the advancements uh what what are your thoughts on I guess AI in the whole Healthcare picture how do you see fitting in oh um so I think that in healthcare we are safe um there is such a human factor in health care to um that that's never going to be replaced by AI um but I think what AI will be able to do for us in the future is make things more efficient how can we take those tasks or um things that are really time consuming for our clinicians that are taking them away from the bedside introduce AI so that we can be more efficient and we can be more um forward facing to the patient um instead of stuck in administrative tasks I've been asking about how we as providers can sort of help patients what we should focus on to improve their care is there anything that you wish patients should know about working in the healthcare Side and being the ones taking trying to take care of them is there anything you wish that the patients uh should be aware of the tides have changed so much postco um and I think that people are are patients even are less compassionate um towards the the teams that are doing the work and are a little bit more short with them get frustrated more easily um and that just creates this wall that goes up with our health care providers and we don't want to be defensive with our patients um we want to make sure that we're very open with them and we're listening and we're taking in everything that they're saying so that we can provide them with the very best care and understand exactly what they're feeling what they're thinking um when there's that you know shortness and frustration it closes us off a little bit and it makes us not listen as much and you know it that's an us problem um but it's really driven by the patients um and kind of how they're presenting to us um so I would almost say to our providers um you know take the wall down every situation is like your difficult situations are not going to happen all the time and you can't use your past experiences with upset patients to dictate the Future Care um that you're going to provide to another patient um so remembering that every patient is a new experience is a new patient is a new life that you have the opportunity to touch and it's not just one life it's all of the people that depend on them within their Community um their friends their families the the people that they take care of outside of that Circle um so one one person impacts way more and we have the opportunity to make it um a better experience for them wow yeah that's that's very amazing um I would like to say thank you for all the service you do for the community for the patients uh and your staff is very wonderful talking to you and thank you for joining us thank you for the opportunity I really appreciate it</p>
Want to reach healthcare executives and decision-makers? Join industry leaders like HealthMap Solutions on our podcast.
Become a GuestDiscover related content across the AJHCS ecosystem