Digital Workspace

Health Systems Make Remote Work an Integral Part of Operations

Remote work is not a temporary option. For many healthcare organizations, it has become an interconnected part of their enterprise.

Chris Hayhurst

Chris Hayhurst is a contributor to the CDW family of technology magazines.

For anyone looking to work at Sentara Health, a good starting point is its online job search engine. With the right qualifications, there’s a breadth of remote roles to consider.

These open positions aren’t limited to just one department: for example a remote senior-level cloud cybersecurity engineer, an addiction and recovery treatment services care coordinator with a master’s degree in counseling or social work, or a payment policy expert. At any time, the Virginia-based health system with more than 30,000 employees advertises dozens of remote openings alongside its evolving slate of in-person roles. And like some other healthcare organizations, it’s been doing this for years.

“We’d started our journey to the cloud well before the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Senior Vice President and CTO Jeffrey Thomas. The shift, which began in 2018, included the deployment of virtual desktop environments and applications in Microsoft Azure, “and that gave us a way to let people work securely wherever they were and whenever they needed,” Thomas says.

Although Sentara Health was well positioned when the public health crisis arrived, its cloud-first focus and remote-ready strategy was designed from the start with the long game in mind. The organization, ahead of its time, had realized that having remote capabilities would become increasingly critical to providing high-quality patient care. Moving to the cloud would make it possible for certain employees to work offsite, but more important, it would prepare Sentara Health for the future: delivering care from anywhere.

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Today, remote work at the health system spans everything from people logging in to its networks from home to physicians and administrators communicating and collaborating across its various facilities. It includes Sentara Health’s centralized nursing system (which allows clinicians to support services provided to patients in other locations) and telehealth for rural communities.

Sentara Health’s remote work is inherently about organizational flexibility, Thomas says, and having the technology that’s needed to operate effectively and efficiently.

“We have a platform that allows us to be less dependent on location and to better utilize our clinical resources,” he says. “I think most people would agree that that’s a great position for us to be in.”

A New Reality of Remote and Hybrid Work in Healthcare

Sentara Health is among a growing number of healthcare organizations that have made remote work a permanent part of their enterprise. Fueled by digital transformation — especially cloud adoption and the streamlining of IT processes — health systems view the ability to work from anywhere as table stakes in the industry.

“Remote is no longer a pandemic trend,” says Christine Belmonte, president of the technology staffing division at The Planet Group, a professional services firm. TPG conducted a 2025 analysis of its job placements over the previous 12 months and found that 69% of the healthcare support roles it filled were entirely remote. That compares with a 2022 McKinsey survey finding that 31% of such roles were fully remote, and 14% were hybrid positions.

Support roles in the industry cover a wide range of administrative functions, Belmonte says, from patient registration to billing and collections to regulatory compliance. Separately, among jobs in healthcare technology — a category that includes systems administrators and cybersecurity specialists, for example — 88% of openings were fully remote, TPG found.

While the firm didn’t look into remote or hybrid openings for clinical staff, a 2025 fact sheet from the American Hospital Association notes that nearly 9 in 10 hospitals now offer telehealth services, and that “expanding the telehealth workforce” could help organizations overcome healthcare staffing shortages.

It’s now much easier to find hospitals in the U.S. that have integrated remote work into their permanent operations. At Cleveland Clinic, for example, thousands of employees work in hybrid or fully remote positions, and the same is true at Baptist Health in Kentucky, where flexible work hours are the norm for many support staff. Boston Children’s Hospital lists hybrid positions for everything from surgical schedulers to occupational and physical therapists. Mayo Clinic’s recent job openings have remote slots in marketing and data science.

The rise and persistence of remote work in the industry doesn’t surprise Belmonte. She points to workplace modernization as a significant driver, but she also says that it’s about “where the talent lives” and evolving employee expectations for what healthcare work should look like.

“If you’re a hospital and you need to hire skilled professionals, offering the opportunity to work remotely could help you find the right people,” Belmonte says.

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A Smooth Transition to Remote Work for Fairview Health Services

At Fairview Health Services, a major modernization initiative helped drive the introduction of remote work and accounts for its continued popularity today. It has also been key to the health system’s telehealth program and the “eVisits” offered through its virtual clinic.

The Minneapolis-based organization, which has more than 100 physical locations, migrated to Microsoft 365 before the pandemic. The new platform made remote work feasible, says IT Infrastructure Director Jason Garbisch, “but working from home was still very much the exception, something you might do on a snow day.”

Today, the picture is very different for many of Fairview Health Services’ 34,000 employees. The health system uses Windows 11 Enterprise to better leverage the apps and services in M365, and the IT team relies on ServiceNow to optimize remote support and management.

Like other organizations in 2020, Fairview Health Services learned that many business workflows could continue as usual without the full workforce in the office. It found success in remotely connecting people to its networks, and it learned that telehealth (and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams) could enable communication as needed.

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“Looking back, it took a lot of planning and training, but the transition was mostly seamless and happened really fast,” Garbisch says. “I think it set us up for where we are now with hybrid and remote work.”

Fairview Health Services’ remote capabilities should only improve in the future, he adds, especially as it adopts artificial intelligence and automation to further modernize its computing environment.

There’s another consideration that may also boost the long-term prospects for remote work: Organizations can reel in escalating costs by minimizing the unnecessary use of expensive real estate. “Fortunately, what we’re finding is that people can work remotely and be just as productive as they are in the office,” Garbisch says.

He knows this because Fairview Health Services has conducted internal studies, but also because he sometimes gets the chance to work from home himself. “When I don’t go in, I can save an hour to 90 minutes each day just on the commute time. It helps me be more productive right away, and I don’t get frustrated sitting in traffic,” he adds.

Although Garbisch is only responsible for the technologies of remote work and not the organization’s policies governing when it’s permissible, he has a prediction: “I personally think remote work is here to stay.”

Photography by Kyle Laferriere