Community Health Network Accelerates New Patient Acquisition and Engagement Efforts for Long-Term, Sustainable Growth with DexCare

About Community Health Network

Community Health Network (CHNw) is an Indianapolis-based non-profit health system that offers a full continuum of healthcare services, world-class innovation, and a focus on population health management. Ranked among the nation’s most integrated healthcare systems, CHNw has more than 200 sites of care and affiliates throughout Central Indiana, integrating hundreds of physicians, specialty and acute care hospitals, surgery centers, home care services, behavioral health, and employer health services.

Learn more about CHNw’s patient-first approach to exceptional care at ecommunity.com.

The Challenge

Since its inception more than 60 years ago, CHNw has remained steadfast to being a health system offering easy-to-access care and the best possible experience for patients and caregivers as articulated in its tagline, “Exceptional Care. Simply Delivered”. Amid the industry’s shift toward consumer-centered care, CHNw’s leadership recognized the urgency to deliver care when and where consumers need it, by improving accessibility and discoverability of care, reducing friction, and by providing an intuitive personalized experience. As an early adopter of virtual care, CHNw also saw an opportunity to further enhance the virtual care experience, scaling to serve more patients while empowering caregivers with a more enjoyable and easy-to-use technology platform, flexible to their needs.

To lay the groundwork for this new ecosystem, CHNw’s leadership team knew they needed to meet consumers at the point where they begin their search for care. Based on internal data, CHNw found that roughly 75% of consumers searching for on-demand primary care at a CHNw location began their search on Google. In comparison, CHNw determined that only 17% of consumers began their search for care via CHNw’s website, where appointment searches and scheduling were the most digitally-enabled. The solution CHNw was seeking would need to improve consumer discoverability and access to care by merchandizing the available care options, while optimizing care teams and capacity.

The Solution

In April 2021, CHNw launched DexCare to achieve the objectives of increasing new patient acquisition, growing service utilization, and providing top-of-license care that’s cost-effective for patients and the organization. DexCare offered a turnkey solution for enabling sustainable growth by engaging consumers anywhere along their care journey, providing actionable access to care options, and guiding consumers to the right site of care, modality, and provider based on their individualized needs.

The solution involved creating, publishing, and promoting consumer-facing mobile and web-based digital experiences, including clinic and provider landing pages, natural language search, and merchandisable care options. DexCare’s API suite and ability to enhance CHNw’s existing tech stacks enabled consumers to easily discover care on digital channels, and to access real-time availability for the care options best suited to their needs. CHNw began deploying DexCare where consumers have the highest expectations, which included on-demand care in virtual, retail, urgent, and primary care settings, before scaling to other areas.

"One of our key value pillars at Community Health Network is ‘Exceptional Care, Simply Delivered.’ Partnering with DexCare has enabled our organization to fulfill this promise by providing a highly discoverable, fully-digitized and unified experience for our consumers. In tandem, DexCare’s unique intelligent navigation and load balancing across providers, settings, modalities, and service lines has helped us allocate, flex, and optimize organizational resources to best meet consumer and business goals."

— Dr. Patrick McGill, EVP, Chief Transformation Officer at Community Health Network

The Results

CHNw now extends its digital front door to the places consumers are looking for care. It provides digital experiences, optimized for conversion, that acquire new patients, engage existing ones, and promote the best care options for patients. Consumers are able to view real-time information when finding and booking care. At the same time, DexCare’s load-balancing and capacity optimization capabilities allow CHNw to match consumers with personalized care options based on their preferences and health system capacity. The integration with CHNw’s EHR system ensures consistency and interoperability.

DexCare has additionally equipped CHNw with data-driven insights into the full patient journey and enables stakeholders to pull disparate data points and generate meaningful analyses. For example, by combining marketing spend with individual clinic performance, CHNw can tie its marketing budget to the cost of acquiring a customer, and from there can understand whether its resource allocation is appropriate. If they build new clinics, CHNw can forecast the optimal investment to build appropriate volume so that new clinics are profitable.

Overall, DexCare has helped CHNw to automatically allocate and optimize its resources to best meet both consumer demand and business goals, and expand its reach in efficient ways. For example, meeting patients at Google for scheduling is attracting new patients to the health system, especially young, growing families who need convenient care options to match their busy lives. Expanding virtual care has also increased access for patients in the surrounding communities who may not have a local care option. As part of this initiative, CHNw has achieved several milestones, including:

377

clinician visit hours saved annually due to increase in efficiency

300%

increase in virtual care capacity

50%

of patients return in 12 months to have a visit via retail or video

12%

of patients are brand new to the CHNw system