Why You Should Personalize Your Digital Front Door Experience

“The pandemic surely accelerated this move to more targeted digital offerings, but the healthcare industry is absolutely headed to personalized care,” said ORBIE award winning CIO, Michael Saad in CHIME’s Digital Health Most Wired 2022 Patient Engagement Trend Report. He added that the move to stimulate and align behaviors is driven, to some extent, by the shift to value-based care, “Now that hospitals and health systems are responsible for the overall wellness of a patient, we need to figure out ways to interact with the patient and do so at their level.” 

In a recent focus group of healthcare CIOs, Gozio asked about personalization as it relates to mobile engagement the digital front door. A new report that summarizes that discussion, highlights some of the potential benefits and challenges.

Why Customize the Experience?
Each of the consumer groups within healthcare—patients, employees, insurance plan members, etc.—has unique challenges and needs. So, a digital or mobile front door can’t be a one size fits all if you are trying to solve specific problems. 

When it comes to creating unique patient experiences for specific groups, the focus group attendees weighed in on the problems they'd like to address:

An IT leader from a large national health system expanded on this, “We're really looking at solutions to the big, big things. Like how do we decrease length of stay?”

Another CIO agreed, adding, “I think an inpatient experience. If we could get feedback while [patients are] here, because a lot of times they get discharged, and they fill out surveys, and they didn't like something. These are things that we could fix if we knew while they were here.”

The group went on to discuss other inpatient scenarios like being able to request pastoral services, order food, let someone know about an issue in their room. Some children’s hospitals are eager to offer fun and engaging experiences like gaming and entertainment options. Others are interested in smoothing the transition from inpatient to outpatient.

A focus group attendee summed it up by saying, “it is about service on demand, where consumers are used to being able to get what they want at the click of a button. There is a growing opportunity out there when it comes to long term conditions because we're talking about wellbeing. People being able to access timely education and self-manage and get real-time access to care and answers to questions. That is an expanding on a landscape.”

There was also a lot of discussion about whether a staff experience or various custom staff experiences on mobile could have benefits.

One CIO immediately said, “The recruitment and retention is a huge issue, especially for our highly specialized folks like our radiation therapists.”

Another added, “I think the question really at the forefront needs to be, how do I reduce the clinicians’ burden. That's it. And you can do that in several ways. How do we streamline rounding? How do we help care for patients faster? I need to get my password reset. I don't have time to sit on hold for that. How can I do that? So that's what I would be looking at. What are those ways to reduce our clinician burden? Because that pays for itself.”

Then a third attendee took it in a different direction, “In this age of hybrid and remote work, something that helps employees who aren’t onsite all the time. Things like getting around the facilities or booking a meeting room and other admin stuff. Or helping them access employee assistance programs. I can see how making all those things available in one place like you can do for patients where they can use single sign on and access tools at one click has potential.”

These were just come of the thoughts on where and how most custom experiences could have an impact. Read the full report for more details on the ways the experiences can be used to address both patient and staff experience.

The original version of this page was published at:  https://www.goziohealth.com/blog/why-you-should-personalize-your-digital-front-door-experience