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Bridge State of Virtual Care 2026: share of virtual care users who prefer virtual vs in-person care, by number of visits

What patients want from virtual care, and what operators should do about it

Bridge surveyed 2,016 U.S. patients about how they find, use, and pay for virtual care. Three findings stood out to me as particularly important for companies trying to grow.
• 9 min read •

By Keaton Bedell, co-founder and CEO of Bridge

I spend a lot of time talking to virtual care operators about how to grow their businesses. Where to find patients, how to get them to come back, which specialties have the biggest opportunities. These are questions that come up constantly in my work at Bridge, where we help virtual care companies launch and scale insurance nationwide.

But I've always felt like we were missing something pretty important in those conversations: comprehensive data on what patients actually want. We've had plenty of data on how fast virtual care is growing, but much less on how patients find it, what they think about it, and what makes them want to use it again.

So we decided to ask them.

Bridge surveyed 2,016 patients across the U.S. for our State of Virtual Care Report. To better understand patients’ experiences with virtual care, we limited respondents who had never used it to 202, leaving 1,814 respondents with firsthand experience.

The results challenged industry assumptions about what actually drives growth in virtual care. Three findings in particular stood out to me, and I think they have real implications for how operators should be building their businesses.

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