The digital transformation of healthcare has led to a proliferation of technology solutions. While the positives outweigh the negatives by far, one of the enduring challenges today’s CIOs face is managing the multiple and varied patient entries and touchpoints into your health system.
From appointment scheduling to paying bills and accessing EHRs to personalized educational content, ownership of patient-facing solutions can come from numerous departments within your enterprise but ultimately fall under the broader umbrella of a digital front door.
Your organization’s digital front door includes all the touchpoints patients have with your health system and is much more than a digital patient engagement solution.
In other words, there is no single technology solution to the problem. Rather, leaders must adopt a strategic approach to managing the disparate solutions across the enterprise, not to mention the change management and leadership required to be successful.
Addressing your digital front door strategy from inside the house
As such, CIOs must figure out how to manage usage while simultaneously creating a framework for your health system’s digital front door of the future.
Start by auditing existing tools to understand the scope of the work ahead. Then, map out how you will address your digital front door strategy from two angles: the front end and the back end.
- Front-end: Telehealth systems, patient portals, and patient engagement platforms are examples of front-end solutions that can anchor your health system’s digital front door strategy.
The goal is to create a uniform experience for patients interacting with your organization, whether they’re scheduling an appointment, reviewing lab results, or paying a bill. While it may be easier for you as the IT leader to have different vendors for various activities, the end result can be a disjointed customer experience that ultimately impacts patient satisfaction and may contribute to leakage.
- Back-end: While managing the front door of the patient experience is critical, knowing what’s happening behind the door is as equally as important. IT leaders must be able to recommend patient touchpoint improvements as well as the clinical workflows associated with them.
Having this visibility across the enterprise can help you identify hypotheses to test. Where is patient engagement highest? How can you automate best practices that increase engagement for specific service lines? The list goes on.
Knowing where and when to invest your resources depends on your organization’s goals.
If your health system’s patient satisfaction scores have declined over the past two years, and your leadership is concerned about patient leakage to competing health systems, you may want to consider aggressively rolling out a patient-facing platform sooner rather than later.
However, if you have a legacy patient portal, it may be more efficient to mine your back-end data to identify potential gaps in your current digital front door strategy before investing in a larger, more resource-intensive patient-facing system.
Accelerate your digital front door strategy
With so many solutions and stakeholders involved, it can be daunting for CIOs to take ownership while maintaining collaboration, but Panda can help.
Panda can facilitate the evaluation, selection, and procurement of best-fit solutions. With first-hand knowledge of 130+ healthcare domains and more than 6,000 vendors, we can provide you with use case-specific recommendations.
Plus, you have the added opportunity to discuss the ins and outs of a digital front door strategy with like-minded peers in our digital health community, a neutral space free of vendor influence.
So, what can you expect? Leaning into our digital health intelligence, we’ve helped CIOs like you reduce the enterprise buying cycle significantly—from more than one year to four-to-six months.
Whether it’s a digital front door strategy or streamlining patient communications, let us curate your next enterprise solution purchase. Let’s chat!
