Setting Up the Virtual Workplace at Centura Health
When Centura Health was still operating under that name, they rolled out a fairly standard virtual workplace suite that covered telehealth scheduling, clinician video workflows, and patient portal access. If you're looking to understand how it functioned in practice, here's what it actually looked like day to day. The platform they used wasn't some proprietary nightmare. It was built on top of Epic's MyChart for the patient side and Epic's own virtual visit infrastructure for providers. If you have access to the Epic environment, the virtual visit module is pretty straightforward. The issue isn't the tool itself. It's the workflow around it. Here's how I set mine up. You need to verify your provider credentials through the hospital's IT department first. That process takes about 3 to 5 business days. Then you configure your availability blocks in Epic's scheduling system, making sure they sync with your real calendar. The biggest mistake people make is leaving default blocks in place that don't match their actual clinic hours. Patients will book slots you can't cover, and that creates a cascade of no-shows and rescheduling headaches.
The virtual visit room itself pulls together video, chat, and document sharing in a single pane. You can switch from a video encounter to sharing a care plan PDF without leaving the room. That part works well. The audio quality depends heavily on your network setup. I've seen clinicians on older Cisco IP phones struggle with echo during patient visits, especially when both parties were on cellular data rather than wired connections. There's a specific edge case that caught me off guard. If a patient joins from a mobile browser instead of the MyChart app, the platform defaults to a lower resolution and sometimes drops the screen sharing feature entirely. I spent about two weeks troubleshooting why certain patients couldn't view my shared diagnostic images. The fix was simple but not obvious: send those patients a direct link to join via the MyChart app rather than a generic meeting code. The difference in experience is night and day.
The Workflow Reality
Documentation during virtual visits follows the same SOAP note structure as in-person encounters. But there's a nuance most people miss. The charting interface doesn't auto-populate vitals the way an in-room workstation does. Patients have to manually enter their blood pressure and temperature before the visit if they want those numbers in the chart. I added a standing instruction to my pre-visit messaging template asking patients to log those numbers at least 15 minutes before their appointment time. This cut my average documentation time by roughly 4 minutes per visit. The platform also integrates with Centura's internal messaging system, which means you can message a colleague about a patient without leaving the virtual visit window. Useful. Not always secure enough though. Make sure you're using the HIPAA-compliant channel within the platform rather than any external messaging if you're discussing identifiable information. One thing the system handles poorly is cross-facility continuity. If you rotate between Centura locations, your virtual visit preferences and templates don't always carry over. I had to rebuild my visit settings when I moved from a campus in Colorado Springs to one in Pueblo. Took about half a day to get everything reconfigured the way I wanted it.
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What Actually Works and What Doesn't
The system works best for follow-up visits, chronic disease management check-ins, and medication adjustments. Those cases rarely need a physical exam component and run smoothly through the platform. For new patient evaluations, it's less ideal. The lack of basic diagnostic capability means you're either referring them in or flying blind on physical findings. There's also a hard limit on concurrent visits. The platform doesn't support having multiple patients in queue the way some EHR-embedded telehealth systems do. You finish one visit, then start the next. This significantly reduces throughput compared to an in-person clinic model. If your goal is volume, virtual visits won't get you there. Another limitation worth noting: the reporting dashboard is basic at best. You get visit counts and some satisfaction scores, but there's no built-in analytics for outcomes tracking or comparative quality metrics. If you need those, you'll have to pull data separately through the institution's data warehouse.
The platform itself has been largely folded into CommonSpirit Health's unified systems following the Centura rebrand. If you're currently using it, expect migration notices over the next rollout cycle. Make sure your custom templates and workflow configurations are exported before any transition happens. I lost about two weeks of customized visit workflows when the initial migration ran ahead of schedule and didn't include my settings. If you're starting fresh and looking for something more robust than what Centura offered, Epic's standalone virtual care module or a dedicated platform like Doxy.me integrated with your EHR might give you more control over the patient experience. The Centura virtual workplace was adequate for its time but showed its age quickly once usage scaled beyond the initial rollout phase.
