The Society for Digital Medicine (DiMe) revealed a new initiative Tuesday at the AHIP 2026 conference that aims to create best practices for contracting with virtual care providers.
DiMe is a nonprofit organization focused on advancing safe digital technologies in healthcare. The new initiative, called Post-Contracting Operational Readiness for Virtual-First Care, will bring together a group of commercial payers, virtual care providers and policy advisors to create a toolkit on how to execute virtual care contracts.
The project comes as commercial payers have entered into numerous contracts with virtual providers. However, many problems often arise between signing the contract and implementing the virtual solution, according to Dina Bam, partnerships manager at DiMe. For example, a contracted virtual provider may not appear in the health plan’s directory or may be listed with incorrect information, making it difficult for members to access care. Additionally, sometimes requests are rejected because the National Provider Identifier (NPI) mapping is incorrect or missing.
“The central problem is that the signing of a contract between a [virtual-first care] “What we constantly hear from payers and virtual care providers is that the disruption happens in the implementation gap between these two moments.”
The initiative will begin this summer and the toolkit will be released in the fall. The toolkit will include:
- A step-by-step roadmap explaining who should do what and in what order, focusing on when problems most often arise
- A minimum viable data standard for virtual provider onboarding that helps payers and providers know what is required
- A 90-day operational readiness scorecard that sets validation checkpoints for directory accuracy, member access, and claims performance
- A set of common failure points and how to resolve them, based on real-world experiences from payers and providers.
“We are also considering adding a member marketing resource to the toolkit to encourage discussion among members. [virtual-first care] project members and payers on this topic, and define clear operational responsibilities and information sharing best practices that ensure members are aware of the virtual care offerings now available in-network as part of their health plans,” Bam said.
Omada Health, a virtual provider for chronic conditions, is a title sponsor and will share first-hand experiences on how to deliver virtual care at scale.
“Virtual care can help bend the curve of chronic disease, but it is only effective at scale when the operations behind it are as robust as the clinical model,” Wei-Li Shao, president of Omada Health, said in a statement. “Payers need evidence, not hype, and Omada is partnering with DiMe to share insights from the playbook we’ve been building over the past decade to make virtual first aid a trusted, scalable part of how chronic care is delivered, not a side project.”
The initiative builds on DiMe’s previous work in virtual care, which created a payer-provider contracting toolkit. It also supports new 2026 Provider Directory accuracy requirements under the No Surprises Act and a CMS final rule that requires submission of Medicare Advantage Directory data by 2027.
Photo: Issarawat Tattong, Getty Images
