In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, health system CIOs, Innovation, Strategy, and Marketing executives are faced with a daunting task: selecting the optimal digital front door solution from a sea of options. This abundance of choices often leads to decision paralysis, costly DIY endeavors, or the adoption of solutions that fail to deliver value to consumers and yield no return on investment.
Consumer frustrations
Consumer dissatisfaction with subpar digital front door solutions is palpable. Faced with clunky interfaces, convoluted workflows, and unnecessary barriers, patients are quick to seek alternatives. Consumer data reveals that if the digital experience falls short, patients are willing to switch allegiance to a competitor health system that offers a superior digital journey.
Health system confusion
Digital Front Door is an innovation category that is as nebulous as it is ubiquitous in today’s healthcare landscape. Like its predecessor “patient engagement”, it seemingly includes any patient-facing technology from text messaging platforms, to chatbots, to virtual triage, to navigation. Health systems selecting from these bolt-on solutions are often picking the tool before understanding and prioritizing the job.
Instructive definition
Often a Rorschach test, the scope of a Digital Front Door for any industry should be to seamlessly help potential customers find, select, and purchase your products or services. Health systems, especially large ones, offer patients dozens of services, but at their core are “selling” doctor’s appointments that eventually lead to higher margin inpatient care, surgeries, and procedures.
Solution criteria
After decluttering the definition, it helps to look at simple, everyday brands that we all encounter and love to guide us on selecting tools for this job: Target, the big box retailer. How would they prioritize their investments among a sea of technology? How do you as a customer most often interact with Target today? In this case, the most obvious answer is the right one: their consumer website and, for loyal customers, their mobile app. Chatbots, SMS reminders, and email campaigns came later, after the two essential platforms were consumer-grade.
Prioritization
Translating that simple analogy to healthcare, three key elements emerge as indispensable for any modern digital front door:
- Showcase availability: No one wants to see items that are out of stock. Therefore, the first imperative is to showcase your inventory and organize it according to the priorities of patients. For your main inlet, primary care appointments, that means earliest available appointments. This includes PCPs and same day care options like virtual care, urgent care centers and walk-in clinics. Show patients their options to be seen as quickly as possible – ideally in as little as 3 clicks – and let them choose. Best-in-class search experiences should look and feel as seamless as Target, Amazon or Yelp.
- Streamline scheduling: Next, your shopping cart and check-out process should be optimized for conversion. Instead, we see health systems inserting lengthy navigation tools, triage workflows, and “guided interactions” that lose 20% of patients for each question asked. Scheduling, especially for primary care, should involve only the essentials: select the provider, location, appointment type, date, and time. Best-in-class scheduling shrink this check-out process to as little as 3 steps.
- Register patients: The next imperative is the most-often overlooked in healthcare – to swiftly convert a casual browser into an official patient. Most EHR workflows rely on registering the patient up to several weeks later, significantly delaying this critical step in conversions. Worse, online registration workflows leverage credit monitoring companies like Experian that pose significant hurdles, resulting in a staggering 50% drop-off rate. Simplifying the registration process is paramount to eliminating friction and capturing patients ready to convert.
- Build loyalty: Finally, no modern business operates without obsessing over repeat customers. At every turn, they encourage their patrons to register for an account, download their app, or sign up for their loyalty program. In healthcare, we can also be cultivating patient loyalty by offering a frictionless, sticky experience. This starts with a distinctive mobile app that knows their preferences, personalizes the experience, and serves not only the patient, but their entire family. Best-in-class systems even offer subscription membership packages that distinguish them in an increasingly competitive market.
The impact of frictionless access
Health systems that prioritize a seamless digital front door experience stand to reap substantial rewards. By implementing straightforward registration processes, one health system witnessed a remarkable influx of over 500,000 net new patients in a single year, accompanied by hundreds of millions in net new contribution margins. Moreover, with 50% of patients utilizing both mobile and web channels to access care, ensuring consistency and ease of access across platforms is essential for building enduring brand loyalty.
The missing category
Patient Acquisition & Retention: A notable gap in the current landscape is the absence of a dedicated category for “Patient Acquisition & Retention.” Amidst a plethora of offerings ranging from triage tools to wayfinding solutions, health systems struggle to find solutions that align with consumer demands and drive tangible ROI. Rather than chasing trends or seeking grandiose implementations, success lies in getting the fundamentals right and prioritizing solutions that deliver genuine value to both consumers and health system financials.
Conclusion
In the face of mounting challenges and relentless competition, digital executives must pivot from following the herd to focusing on fundamentals that truly matter. By addressing consumer needs, streamlining access to care, and fostering patient loyalty, health systems can position themselves for long-term success in an increasingly digital-centric healthcare landscape. It’s time to prioritize simplicity, efficacy, and consumer-centricity before it’s too late.
Dr. Aasim Saeed is the Founder and CEO of Amenities Health, which helps healthcare systems build and offer modern digital tools and novel direct-to-consumer memberships designed to help them compete in an increasingly crowded market. Aasim is a 2022 Presidential Leadership Scholar, selected for his mission to fix the patient experience in the US healthcare industry.
Before launching Amenities, Aasim led innovation at Baylor Scott & White Health, where he and his team were responsible for the industry-leading MyBSWHealth app. Before becoming a healthcare executive, Aasim served as a Manager in McKinsey’s healthcare practice, serving prominent US and international healthcare systems in strategy, operations, and procurement. In his personal life, Aasim lives in the historic Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas with his wife and 3 kids and has volunteered for over 20 years with the American Legion Texas Boys State program.
