As health systems seek out new ways to improve patient engagement, deliver a more consumer-centric experience, and expand capacity, having a clear digital front door strategy has become an increasingly essential component of their efforts.
For example, healthcare leaders listed “digital front door and virtual care” as among their three-highest priority areas for digital and information technology investment in 2024, according to a survey by Guidehouse. Open scheduling, virtual visits, and advanced analytics were particular areas of focus for organizations seeking to boost their digital front door investment.
It’s thus no surprise that healthcare leaders would prioritize their digital front door investment. The digital front door can be a health system’s most effective and powerful patient funnel in today’s digital first world. However, getting the strategy right can be a heavy lift as organizations seek to optimize patient care with the right solutions that support scheduling, triaging, virtual visits, staffing, documenting, sharing data, follow up, and more.
For patients, today’s digital front door should ideally offer a single point-of-access to care, a convenient experience, consistent communication, data transparency, and the ability to save money over urgent care and emergency department visits. For providers, the digital front door strategy should support improved productivity, enhanced practice efficiency, seamless care coordination, and better patient engagement and retention.
Three questions to ask of virtual care partners
Forward-thinking healthcare organizations are actively developing their digital front door strategies to maintain pace with the surging patient demand for digital tools that simplify the healthcare experience.
As part of this strategy, they may be considering a variety of virtual care partners to help meet their goals. To help health systems better evaluate these partners, here are three critical questions to consider in helping to ensure you pick the right one:
- How is the patient experience when using a partner? In today’s age of “isolated telehealth vendors,” it will be important to look for a “connected virtual care partner” to ensure a great virtual care experience for your patients. First, the process should feel seamless in moving from a request to seeing a Virtualist provider (e.g., no need to register in a new system.) Second, patients should know their provider has full access to their data without having to re-enter their past history. Third, patient should know that anything that happens during the visit will be available in their health system portal and be sent to their primary doctors. Having all these in place will make the patient much more comfortable and help ensure a higher quality visit.
- How can the solution increase revenue? Expanding access via a virtual care partner can impact revenue in multiple ways. First, a partner can immediately help increase the number of patients a health system can see in a day (aka capacity.) This may result in direct revenue (if billing is assigned to the health system,) as well as downstream revenue from additional care that may be needed. Additionally, this decreases the risk of leakage and downstream loss of loyalty. Second, easier online access will minimize phone calls and messages to providers and staff, allowing them to focus on more patient-facing, revenue-generating activities. Third, shifting routine, low complexity care to a partner (aka “load-balancing”) means that office-based providers will have more time for the higher-value care that is more appropriate for office settings (with the caveat that they should also be given more time for these complex patients.)
- When should you consider partnering vs. in-sourcing? In making this decision, health systems should balance their limited resources with a focus on what they are great at doing: taking care of highly complex patients who need to be seen in a physical setting. Providing online care for low complexity and routine issues is rarely a differentiator for a health system and comes with several challenges, including higher operating costs, significant technological burdens, and difficulties in optimizing staffing (especially when patients require 24×7 or are traveling out-of-state.) Health systems should thus look for virtual care partners that are optimized around the automation, delegation and virtualization of routine, repeatable, rule-based care that does not need to be physically performed in an office.
By partnering with a virtual care expert, health systems can effectively widen their front doors to deliver care 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year in a seamless, convenient and well-connected manner. The result is a better experience for patients, decreased burdens on health system physicians, and increased financial security for health systems.
Lyle Berkowitz, MD is the Founder and CEO of KeyCare, the nation’s only virtual care company built on the Epic platform. He has more than twenty years of experience as a primary care physician, a health system executive, an informatician, a healthcare innovator and a serial entrepreneur. Previous roles include Founder & Chairman of Healthfinch, Chief Medical Officer at MDLIVE and Director of Innovation for Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. He graduated with a Biomedical Engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.
