Collette Health has acquired the Virtual Nursing Academy (VNA), a self-directed education program founded by nurse leader Bonnie Clipper, DNP, designed to help hospitals stand up and scale virtual care programs. According to the company, bringing VNA in-house aligns its virtual observation and virtual nursing technology with structured change management and training, aiming to remove one of the biggest barriers to adoption: workforce readiness and implementation expertise.
What’s New and Why it Matters
Hospitals are scaling virtual nursing with integrated tech and standardized training.
Per today’s announcement, VNA will continue to operate under Dr. Clipper’s leadership while becoming a core on-ramp for Collette Health customers implementing virtual nursing and related models of care. The academy’s curriculum focuses on strategy, pilot design, governance, outcomes tracking, and operational optimization—areas that hospital leaders frequently cite as stumbling blocks when moving from pilots to enterprise scale.
“By joining Collette Health, we can provide a robust foundation that empowers nursing teams to build sustainable virtual care programs.” — Bonnie Clipper, DNP
The move also comes as Collette Health highlights market traction and third-party validation: the company was ranked #1 in the 2025 Best in KLAS “Virtual Sitting & Nursing” category, and it continues to promote a cloud-first architecture, stating that it uses substantially less network bandwidth than competing approaches. (Best in KLAS ranking per KLAS Research; performance and bandwidth claims per company materials.)
The Broader Virtual Nursing Race
The acquisition lands in a busy month for inpatient virtual care:
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Yale New Haven Health + Artisight. Last week, YNHH signed an enterprise-wide agreement to deploy Artisight’s Smart Hospital Platform, starting with virtual nursing and expanding to computer-vision and ambient AI use cases—an emblem of health systems consolidating multiple AI workflows on a common infrastructure.
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LookDeep Health’s agentic AI. In August, LookDeep introduced aimee, positioning it as an AI agent that “sees, hears, and responds” at the bedside to support patients and clinical teams—an example of virtual nursing’s evolution toward multimodal, context-aware assistants.
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AvaSure’s bedside AI assistant. Earlier this year at HIMSS25, AvaSure previewed a bedside AI virtual care assistant developed with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and NVIDIA—another signal that vendors are pairing virtual nursing workflows with generative and vision models.
Together, these moves underscore a competitive trend: platforms aren’t just adding “virtual nurse” staffing models; they’re bundling computer vision, ambient sensing, and LLM-driven copilots into integrated toolsets that promise to extend nurse reach, streamline documentation, and improve safety.
How the Acquisition Could Impact Hospital Deployments
Collette Health frames the VNA deal as a way to integrate technology + education + clinical leadership under one roof. The Virtual Nursing Academy markets a structured path from strategy through scale, which could shorten time-to-value for hospitals that already have cameras and carts but lack a formal operating model or governance. (VNA program details per the academy site.)
“One of the biggest barriers isn’t the technology—it’s education and change management,” said Collette Health CEO Holly Miller.
If executed as described, the approach may help:
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Reduce variance in program design. Standardized playbooks and outcomes tracking can mitigate site-by-site drift that slows ROI realization. (Company claim.)
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Speed workforce readiness. Packaging clinical education with platform rollout could address change-management resistance that often dogs early phases of virtual nursing. (Company claim.)
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Align with KLAS-recognized performance. Independent recognition gives procurement teams air cover to scale beyond observation to fuller virtual nursing models. (KLAS category ranking.)
Competitive Context and Key Questions for Buyers
With health systems comparing options from Collette Health, Artisight, AvaSure, LookDeep and others, buyers should pressure-test:
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Operating model fit. Does the vendor provide a validated governance framework, staffing model, and KPI set—or just technology? (VNA suggests Collette is emphasizing this dimension.)
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Infrastructure strategy. Can the platform support multiple use cases (virtual nursing, safety, documentation) without parallel tech stacks? Artisight’s YNHH deal is one example of a “single fabric” approach.
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AI transparency and safety. For agentic features (e.g., aimee, AvaSure’s assistant), what’s the supervision model and how are edge cases handled?
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Proof points beyond pilots. Best-in-KLAS signals satisfaction; still, request multi-site outcomes and total cost (including networking, which some vendors claim to minimize).
Patient Value
Virtual nursing’s promise is to keep patients safer and better supported—particularly during staffing crunches and off-hours—by extending nurse reach without diluting care. Education-first rollouts could reduce false starts that frustrate bedside teams and, ultimately, patients. If hospitals can move from small pilots to reliable, system-wide operations, the impact should be felt in fewer preventable harms and faster response times—measures that matter to clinicians and families alike.
According to Collette Health, Dr. Clipper will continue to lead the academy and advise Collette Health clinically—an arrangement meant to keep educational content aligned with bedside realities as programs scale.
Sourcing notes: Acquisition release and quotes per PR Newswire; VNA program details per VNA site; KLAS ranking per KLAS Research; additional market context per Business Wire/Becker’s on YNHH–Artisight; LookDeep and AvaSure releases for agentic/AI assistant developments.
– This original article was created with AI support.
