Digital Front Door Healthcare: Revolutionizing the Patient Experience

Many industries are embracing digital transformation, and the healthcare industry is no exception. Patients expect their healthcare providers to meet them where they are, and increasingly, that is online and in the cloud.

Digital solutions have taken center stage in pursuing a superior patient experience, which is why the market is now worth $330 billion as of 2022. Digital front door strategies are at the heart of recent changes to make healthcare more accessible and improve patient experience.

The digital front door in healthcare has become a buzzword in the industry. You may wonder what it is and how it can make a difference in your workplace. Read on to learn everything you need about the digital front door.

Are you concerned about the quality of your patient experience?

You should be. Approximately 60% of Americans claimed they have had a negative healthcare experience in the last three months, showing that the industry consistently fails its patients. By using a digital front door strategy, providers acquire and implement the tools required to provide a genuine omnichannel patient engagement strategy.

Although dedicated digital front door solutions exist, the premise of the digital front door is a strategy rather than a product. The purpose is to engage patients at every touchpoint during their journeys, using the technology they already use daily.

Digital front door healthcare trends have piggybacked on the innovations that consumer brands have already implemented. For example, telehealth visits comprised of 17% of healthcare visits in 2023, a massive increase over 2019 when only 0.1% of healthcare visits were virtual. This technology is largely responsible for driving increased interest in the digital front door.

By learning from other industries, healthcare brands can leverage the solutions that will ultimately drive patient satisfaction to new heights.

Technology integration is nothing new. Any healthcare provider knows that technology trends come and go. And in many cases, they achieve little.

For example, patient portals have been a healthcare staple for years, yet only 35% of patients signed up to use them for one reason or another. The digital front door aims to change that by weaving technology into the very fabric of the patient experience rather than using it as a bolt-on extra.

So, why should you employ a digital front door healthcare specialist to change how your patients interact with your brand?

The digital front door breaks down the barriers to healthcare access. By incorporating virtual care into your patient journey, patients can schedule appointments, ask questions, and attend online appointments via their smart devices wherever they are at any time.

Improve the Patient Experience

Patient retention is the lifeblood of your business, but a confusing patient journey can overwhelm people. The digital front door is designed to simplify and automate the primary features of each person’s journey.

These solutions provide better access to information, make it easier to engage in self-care, and let patients manage their care faster.

Proper engagement is critical to creating and managing stronger connections with your patients. But with healthcare clinics inundated, it can be challenging for doctors and nurses to give patients the time and attention they expect.

With a digital front door strategy, providers can incorporate other forms of communication to compensate, such as telehealth and SMS messaging.

Once your patient has stepped through your digital front door, you have the tools to improve the overall care experience by leveraging big data.

With post-care satisfaction surveys, you can create an ongoing data cache that directs you toward the value-driven improvements needed to make your healthcare facility the best in town. Why? Because these solutions leverage AI and machine learning tools to analyze every micro-stage in the patient journey.

It’s no secret that patients rarely take follow-up appointments seriously for one reason or another, contributing to an average no-show rate of 18.8%.

While no-shows are frustrating, they also create liability risks for physicians. Re-engaging your patients and simplifying the process of booking a follow-up appointment makes it likelier that your patients will attend.

We can already see the impact of technology on no-shows, with telehealth no-show rates at just 7.5%. This happens through personalized messaging that reminds and encourages patients to follow up on their care.

Anything that improves the patient experience also benefits healthcare practitioners by making their jobs easier and driving revenue to their operations. But how do you go about initiating a digital front door in healthcare?

Alongside the digital front door healthcare diagram, every healthcare provider needs a digital front door healthcare checklist to ensure you hit all the right notes.

In this section, we provide an introduction to creating the skeleton of a digital front door that provides value to your patients and employees.

Your patients are not a single homogenous group. They have different wants and needs. Pediatrics is very different from geriatrics.

The first step to defining patient needs is reviewing your support call logs and speaking to your support staff about the most common complaints. You can also hand out patient questionnaires in the waiting room.

The feedback you receive from all parties will help you identify which areas you need to catch up in.

Creating an online appointment platform can relieve administrative burdens and let patients schedule appointments at their convenience.

This should form part of an intuitive launch pad that centralizes everything from billing to recommended follow-up appointments. Like all solutions, it should be a simplified single sign-on platform that even the less tech-savvy can master in minutes.

One of the biggest bottlenecks in the patient journey is the check-in process. Busy urgent care clinics may have long lines of patients answering questions and filling out paper forms. This strains the staff, reduces your clinic’s productivity, and exposes the healthy to the sick.

KIOSK breathes life into automation via innovative check-in kiosks that offer patients a contactless way to check-in to appointments with just a few clicks. Minimize tedious paper forms, reduce administrative errors, and streamline insurance issues.

Every home has just one front door, and so should your clinic. The most significant change you can make is eliminating the complex mess of apps, patient portals, and messaging systems. The purpose of the best digital front door in healthcare is to provide a unified platform for everything.

Automation and AI technologies have opened new opportunities for healthcare providers to serve their patients. Automation can pre-fill standardized forms with known information, such as:

These pre-population functions can be triggered automatically whenever a patient takes a particular action, such as an attempt to schedule an appointment or make an insurance claim.

AI also has its part to play. The rapidly advancing proficiency of AI products is transforming chatbots, which can now master conversational interactions. This offers a chance to supply patients with easy-to-understand information that leads them through their respective journeys without employee intervention.

Any good digital front door in healthcare remains flexible enough to integrate changes as technology and patient needs change.

Your strategy must be fluid and have a plan to account for new innovations. Maintaining a fit-for-purpose digital front door means scheduling regular audits and monitoring every digital front door healthcare KPI. By putting your strategy front and center, you will continue to fulfill the demands of the patients you serve.

The patient journey is unique to each person, but at the heart of each journey is the interface that every person interacts with.

Kiosks in your healthcare facility offer an intuitive patient experience that covers administration, education, and even the claims process from the same interface. At KIOSK, we provide healthcare-specific kiosks that revolutionize the patient experience and improve your bottom line.

To learn more about how our kiosk technology can transform your patient experience, contact us now.