Why do healthcare organizations need strong digital front doors? To thriving health systems, medical groups, and hospitals it is crucial to have a powerful digital front door strategy.
A robust digital front door is an omnichannel customer engagement strategy. It utilizes tech advancement for automating the manual workload to reduce days to collect, create payment plans, shrink the risk of no-shows, manage high-impact functions of the practice, and free staff to interact with patients efficiently.
In this blog, we’ll examine what digital front door means and how your organization may meet consumers’ needs. We’ll find out the five payoffs you can expect from your digital front door strategy that can help you to engage more patients.
What Is a Digital Front Door?
It aims to utilize innovative technology for improving the patient experience in the consumer journey at every touchpoint. Digital front doors represent all the steps that healthcare providers can utilize outside the point of care for interacting with their patients.
It isn’t the telehealth, the patient portal, and the corporate website. Although it accounts for access points and can be all these things merged into a strategy. Beyond typical business hours, you can have digital strategies that open multiple access points to patients.
Identify how many of the patient touchpoints can be accessed digitally, through a mobile device, and with a few steps as possible by thinking about the patient journey through your healthcare organization.
For instance, a patient touchpoint isn’t as accessible as it can be if he has to download an app to gain access or enter a username/password. It has primarily been relegated to the operations side until recently when digital technology has started playing its role in medicine. It has primarily been relegated to the operations side until recently when digital technology has started playing its role in medicine.
A recent survey found that only 7% of medical practices said they had gone digital, this digital rollout is emerging nowadays. According to McKinsey, people are taking this seriously, and wellness spending is on the rise across the globe.
Meet Patient Needs
Patients are making their lives better by rapidly adopting new technologies. They choose convenience even though they have to pay an extra price. The digital front door solutions can be a quick answer to a consumer-grade, it can provide receptiveness and a convenient care experience in healthcare.
It helps connect patients and providers across any service line and
- Triage & route patients efficiently.
- Accelerate top-line revenue generation.
- Reduce revenue leaks and increase patient acquisition.
Five Big Payoffs_ From a Robust Digital Front Door
Better Patient Access
The modern healthcare industry has created new barriers to patient access and it has arisen the need for digital access. There would be no gap between patients and healthcare providers. They would be able to complete forms without messing with papers or playing phone tags with medical offices, schedule/change appointments, and get answers to simple questions.
Following software solutions can be opened digitally by patient access points such as,
- Automated waitlists.
- Automated health campaigns.
- Patient self-scheduling.
- Digital patient registration and intake.
- Mobile billing and payments.
Increased Data Sharing
The use of data has accelerated at the highest rate for informing clinical (operational) and strategic decision-making. To power command centers for managing the demand or supply of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment).
Healthcare providers share data and are rapidly moving from data-driven to insight-driven decision-making. They are utilizing AI (Artificial Intelligence), health systems, and data-driven models to get predictive analytics for clinical decision-making as well as enhancing population health management.
Higher Patient Retention
‘’64% of patients said they want to switch health systems according to a recent Accenture report as they don’t have access to up-to-date information, their expectations are not met regarding safety protocols, and don’t have availability of virtual care options‘’.
At this point, you can strengthen your ability to retain the patients you already have by digital front door strategy. It also helps you to attract new patients.
A powerful digital strategy helps your patients to achieve better adherence to care plans, get to their appointments as scheduled, and make changes accordingly. This equips patients with better information to calm their fears or anxieties and lifts the burdens/frustrations associated with their experience.
Telehealth is effective if patients know that it is available to them and they can access it. It only has become a key component of the digital front door strategy. It can be more accessible when merged with procedures like scheduling. Patients can use this strategy to self-access their time and date, get 24/7 support, and self-select their visit format.
Telehealth with digital tools enables you to update patient information digitally involving insurance cards and payer information. It is a stronger strategy that will lead to higher ROI (Return on investment).
Furthermore, when you provide great customer service to your patients you see an improvement in patient retention. Your patients are more likely to want to stay with you when you invest in technology that helps your practice offer convenient and personalized care.
Easier to Navigate
Patients usually find navigating their healthcare experiences overwhelming and intimidating. Many times they may simply be unfamiliar with your organization other times they have many tests, procedures, and appointments on the schedule.
Whether you are a large practice with many subspecialties and a small practice with just a few. Your patients must have better knowledge and access to help when they need it.
Fewer Gaps In Care
Gaps in care indicate that a patient is at risk of negative outcomes, higher acuity, and complications. It could be detrimental to quality certifications and initiatives that healthcare providers strive hard to support.
New financial challenges have arisen, the difficulty for patients & providers were furloughed, some clinic locations closed temporarily, and patients became too afraid to access care.
A robust digital front door helps you identify which patients have gaps in their care and makes it possible to bridge these care gaps by
- Getting patients back on the schedule
- Take them back in compliance with their care plans.
- Preventive health.
- Chronic disease management.
From making it easy to re-enter the health system and get on the schedule to inform patients that all locations are open. Your digital front door enables you to have different options for accessing care.
Modernization Of Healthcare Organizations
Medical facilities are increasingly recognizing the significance of connecting their patient-facing functions with their other enterprise functions (i.e., front-end & back-end office tasks).
For instance; An EHR contains the entire medical profile of patients. EHR integrations with the scheduling assistant, patient portal, and billing software are necessary for administrative staff and patients to access critical information on time.
Healthcare practices have embraced digital transformation to modernize as well as integrated innovative solutions to automate the entire billing cycle, facilitate middle and back-office transformation (e.g., Finance, HR, Cyber Security, etc.)
Moving forward, it will be important for healthcare providers to adopt new practice guidelines, become comfortable with technology, be more resilient, and be feasible with remote working environments. They work towards sustaining a hybrid working model for their workforce and try not to lose the capability of working remotely.
Importance Of Digital Front Door For Patients
You become able to deliver, meaningful, seamless, and connected care experience to your patients with the help of a digital front door strategy. This experience may support your patients at various points of their virtual and clinical care journey. These digital front doors present a wraparound experience that changes the way patients get engage with their care.
Importance Of Digital Front Door For providers
A healthcare provider can do the following things to sustain the digital front door that they have implemented:
- Conduct a gap analysis to identify capabilities.
- Identify key performance indicators.
- Develop an implementation benefits realization model.
- Reduce wait times & administrative burden by leveraging automation.
- Ensure privacy, scalability, and interoperability.
- Enable seamless patient experience.
- Educate the workforce on how to use digital front door solutions.
- Redesign care pathways with a digital care approach.
Conclusion
Digital front door enables you to have clearly defined goals and a plan to work. But keep in mind that digital patient engagement is not a tactic but it’s a strategy.
You can improve your relationships with your patients by adding meaningful touchpoints that provide more initiative patient engagement. In addition to this, a digital front door within your reach will ultimately provide better results – for you and your patients.
Hence, you must look for innovators who can deliver tangible results with proven track records, and stick with customers for a long time.
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