Digital Front Door: An Overview

Healthcare organizations are prioritizing the need for a robust digital front door strategy to increase patient engagement, access to care and loyalty. This strategy is all about creating an efficient, convenient and accessible healthcare experience through employing different types of digital solutions that better facilitate one’s patient journey. Digital health has spurred this idea of having a strong ‘digital front door’ in order to improve patient acquisition and user convenience on both sides – patients as well as healthcare providers.

Key Takeaways

• Digital Front Door (DFD) seeks to improve patient engagement and access through digital solutions.
• DFD is a collection of technologies that provide easy access points for providers, payers, and patients.

The advantages of Digital Front Door include

• enhanced operational efficiency
• revenue cycle management
• improved patient satisfaction and outcomes
• readily available health data in digital format
• personalized patient engagement tools
• seamless integration with existing systems
• compliance with data security/privacy regulations

The Rise of Digital Health

The ‘digital front door’ concept in healthcare, boosted by digital advancements like wearables, apps, and remote monitoring tools, empowers patients to have more control over their health management. This approach, influenced by the customer interaction revolution brought about by companies like Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Netflix, shapes patient expectations from healthcare services. Telehealth technology plays a crucial role in this, improving access to care and offering various payment options. Patient intake technologies facilitate this process, and practitioners can ensure customer satisfaction by collecting feedback through post-care surveys and analyzing sentiment at each digital touchpoint.

Common Components of a Digital Front Door

The digital front door encompasses a vast range of interaction points between providers, payers and patients – such as self-scheduling, online surveys and automated reminders for follow up. This patient engagement strategy is aimed at providing users with easy access to the health care services they need while also promoting positive experiences from start to finish.

Balancing Demand and Capacity with a Digital Front Door

Implementing a digital front door in healthcare is not just about simply digitizing your scheduling processes, but also about effectively managing patient demand and provider capacity within health systems. At DexCare we believe that digital experiences in health systems should mirror the simplicity of ecommerce experiences that consumers are accustomed to.

How DexCare Can Layer Onto Your Digital Front Door Strategy

Digital Discovery

Over 50% of web visits come from a mobile device. 71% of consumers look for providers online and prefer mobile. When it comes to patient experience and finding the right care, patients want to be met where they are. 50% of users abandon sites that take more than 3 seconds to load. DexCare Fast Pages optimize your entire top of funnel to meet Google’s latest performance benchmarks, resulting in expanded discoverability from search results.

The net result is greater reach, more traffic, and an experience that amazes your customers.

Care Navigation

Healthcare websites are dependably complex, offering points of entry that often result in a dead end. DexCare’s Omni Search Natural Language Processing Model (NLP) provides a flexible medical taxonomy and synonym library to understand user intent and intelligently surface the most relevant, best-fit care. DexCare balances how and when to surface slots based on consumer needs and health system capacity.

Smart Scheduling

DexCare helps our clients bring the most availability to consumers by aggregating slots and cross selling based on availability, proximity, and modality

Aggregate availability across multiple individual provider schedules to create a provider agnostic schedule. Our high conversion, custom booking flows can help you grow consumer share through a unified consumer experience.

Virtual On Demand

Maximize conversions with our high velocity, white labeled video platform that provides the ability for a patient to be queued, book and be seen for a virtual visit (phone or video).

Real-World Examples and Success Stories

Digital front door strategies have seen great success when implemented in healthcare organizations such as Community Health Network (CHNw). DexCare has allowed provider organizations such CHNw to give patients more control over their own care journey while boosting engagement and accessibility of health services simultaneously. For instance, CHNw’s leadership team aimed to meet consumers where they begin their search for care. They found that roughly 75% of consumers searching for on-demand primary care at a CHNw location began their search on Google, while only 17% began their search for care via CHNw’s website. Recognizing this, CHNw sought a solution that would improve consumer discoverability and access to care by effectively displaying the available care options while optimizing care teams and capacity. This is clear evidence that digital front doors can dramatically enhance our healthcare systems for both providers and customers alike.

The utilization of these technology-enabled solutions has yielded positive returns to all involved parties—seeing an increase in patient throughput, improved patient outcomes along and enhanced workflow efficiency.

Advantages for Healthcare Providers

Healthcare providers have much to gain from deploying a digital front door strategy, such as the automation of manual processes leading to increased efficiency and reduction of missed appointments. This can provide them with new ways for drawing in patients while also keeping current customers loyal through quick collection times that leave staff free to focus on interacting with people or managing other areas within their practice.

Increased Patient Volume

A digital front door strategy can enable greater patient access to healthcare services by eliminating entry barriers and creating an easier path for gaining information, scheduling appointments and communicating with providers. This type of approach may attract new patients while also promoting engagement among current ones. Automated reminders and online appointment scheduling implemented via a digital system can result in more successful outcomes such as fewer missed sessions which would have positive impacts on both health care provider performance and overall patient volumes.

Streamlined Workflow

The adoption of digital front door solutions by healthcare providers offers round-the-clock care and enhanced telehealth capabilities, leading to increased patient throughput. Providing flexible payment options that fit patients’ needs can improve satisfaction levels while streamlining the revenue cycle process for medical teams. Offering these features not only contributes to better outcomes, but also encourages loyalty from customers. Deploying a digital consent management system helps reduce administrative tasks so more time is spent catering to client requirements in an efficient manner.

Enhanced Patient Retention

A digital front door strategy is essential for healthcare providers to establish and maintain long-term relationships with their patients. This plan can create multiple patient interaction channels, enhancing the convenience of accessing various health services that meet modern expectations. As a result, it increases customer satisfaction while decreasing missed appointments. Thereby improving both engagement and loyalty in order to achieve success within the sector overall. Such an approach fosters improved patient retention by meeting or exceeding needs, which leads to happy customers who will stay loyal over time.

Summary

To conclude, healthcare providers can greatly benefit from the implementation of a digital front door strategy. Such strategies have the potential to revolutionize patient engagement and workflows while also improving outcomes for both patients and practitioners alike. In an ever-changing healthcare provider landscape, it is paramount that these organizations adopt new tools such as this one in order to stay competitive. Enabling them meet evolving expectations whilst strengthening connections with their population base in order to deliver exemplary care through digital transformation. The future success of health services heavily relies on digital approaches like this ‘front door’.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a digital front door?

A digital front door offers a better digital experience both for patients and members by providing access to health providers and payers in a virtual format. This allows the opportunity of greater engagement, with an improved user journey through digitally connecting them.

What is the value of a digital front door?

Digital front doors enable providers to not only strengthen their connection with patients, but also augment the efficiency of operations and broaden healthcare access.

What does front door mean in tech?

The digital front door of a company serves as the entry point for their customers, giving them access from start to finish. It is what enables users to interact with the organization and provides all necessary information until engagement has been completed.

How does a digital front door empower patients?

Patients are provided with the power to manage their healthcare journey through a digital front door or patient portal, offering them access to pertinent health information and providing means for communication with care providers via digital means.