A Guide to Digital Front Doors in Healthcare

Posted on July 30, 2024 by Kopius

As the healthcare field rapidly evolves, the digital front door has become a valuable strategy for leveraging technology to deliver a better patient experience while reducing costs. A digital front door encompasses a conglomeration of features, from online appointment scheduling to telehealth visits, all selected to create cohesive, engaging, and high-value interactions.

What Is a Digital Front Door in Healthcare?

In healthcare, the definition of a digital front door encompasses a strategy for engaging with patients through user-friendly digital technology. It often uses technology the patients already have, like a smartphone and app, that unifies the patient experience and connects patients to care across the continuum. In short, a digital front door connects and scales the virtual care journey to give patients what they need, when they need it.

This idea started with traditional patient portals, and the digital front door has evolved to include a more overarching approach centered around patient-centered care and accessibility. Data-driven, highly personalized customer brands like Amazon and Apple are expanding into the healthcare sphere, so staying competitive with consumer-oriented experiences will be nothing short of crucial.

Take appointment scheduling, for example. Surveys show that 67% of patients prefer booking appointments online, and an overwhelming 95% of them are either “somewhat” or “much more” likely to choose a service provider offering online booking. Unsurprisingly, online appointment scheduling is one of the most prominent elements of digital front doors in healthcare.

Some providers use one robust application or portal to meet a virtual front door strategy, although you can do it with multiple systems. Features you might have in a digital front door solution include:

Self-scheduling and care coordination.
Bill pay and payment plans.
Provider communications.
Appointment reminders.
Telehealth.
Virtual forms, such as intake and consent management.
Virtual check-in and pre-registration.
Kiosks for in-office check-in.
Data collection and analytics.

How Does a Digital Front Door Enhance the Patient Experience?

One of the primary goals of digital front doors is to improve the patient experience, which comes with various benefits for patients and providers, like improved clinical outcomes, adherence, and loyalty. With the industry’s shift to value-based programs, designing a great experience throughout the patient journey can also support increased revenue while reducing costs through efficient care delivery.

Using a digital front door helps improve experiences in many areas, such as:

Improving accessibility with flexible, personalized tools.
Supporting providers in delivering more attentive, effective, and efficient care.
Empowering customers to actively manage their health.
Meeting customers where they’re at with appropriate digital technology and options.
Boosting patient loyalty through easy-to-use, convenient, and engaging programs.
Reducing wait times with self-serve resources and streamlined care delivery.

These benefits often overlap and build upon each other. For example, when patients use self-service tools to check in early or submit forms, they reduce wait times in the office and help providers work more efficiently.

Patient Portals vs. Digital Front Doors

While patient portals are often a central element to digital front doors, they shouldn’t reflect your entire strategy. These systems do a great job of putting digital tools in one easy-to-access space. However, they often lack user-friendly designs. Many providers use portals offered by the company that built their electronic health record (EHR). EHRs are complex, unwieldy, and designed for providers. Translating the information into a consumer-friendly program proves challenging.

Similarly, portals may not offer tools to help providers in nonclinical aspects of care. A comprehensive digital front door strategy drives digital innovation through insights, like collecting information on how patients interact with you and how those interactions affect their care journeys. It also provides a more personalized, patient-centric approach. For example, you might offer educational resources for a patient with a new diagnosis, or you could prompt someone to activate reminders after they missed a payment.

Although patient portals are highly valuable, digital front doors address their shortcomings to create more cohesive and user-friendly experiences.

How Data Analytics Drive Healthcare Digital Front Doors

Data analytics is a cornerstone of digital front doors in healthcare. It can help you personalize care and make technology decisions based on real-world data about your patients and services.

Say you collect surveys from patients about their preferred payment methods. You find that many people pay larger sums with credit cards because they don’t have the funds available. With this new insight, you add payment plans to your online portal, helping more people afford care and offering a better experience, simultaneously boosting accessibility and satisfaction.

Leveraging data analytics solutions can help you identify new opportunities of all kinds and measure the efficacy of your digital front door strategy.

6 Tips for Implementing a Digital Front Door

Implementing a virtual front door requires thoughtful planning and consideration for various aspects of your practice. Consider these digital front door implementation tips to boost your chances of success.

1. Craft a Robust Digital Front Door Strategy

Malia Jacobson, healthcare content strategist at Valence, suggests you start by identifying your overarching goals. “When embarking on a digital effort in healthcare, it’s important to start by understanding which changes you need to see in the organization. Are you pursuing improved patient satisfaction scores? Physician satisfaction? ED/Urgent Care wait times? Quality and safety scores? Each area targeted for improvement may influence priorities differently.”

Many healthcare providers are developing digital solutions to address patient satisfaction, reduce service demand, and reduce administrative overhead. In addition to standard features of a digital front door experience, providers should consider designing for experiences such as:

Self-service: Provide tools for bill pay, self-scheduling, care coordination, and finding providers to offer streamlined and convenient access.
Provider messaging and patient outreach: Improve access, loyalty, and engagement.
Information and imaging libraries: Support patient and provider education.
Practice management: Capacity and census management, forecasting, and discharge planning streamline operations.
Insights-driven capabilities: Capabilities like infectious disease tracking, forecasting, and population health initiatives support proactive planning and informed decision-making.
Premium privacy and security: Safeguard patient data and meet compliance requirements.
Adoption-focused activities: Gamification and push notifications help increase awareness and usage of the program.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation features: Features like chatbots reduce clinical burden and improve patient flow.
Support for healthcare information exchange: Stay in compliance with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards and best practices.

As you ideate your digital products and strategy, it’s important to understand how these features interplay as part of a big-picture roadmap with a rollout timeline and strategy. You don’t have to release everything at once to be successful, and adding features as the platform develops and collects user feedback will future-proof the effort.

2. Keep Your Users Front and Center

“While a digital front door is a technology solution, it’s ultimately about humanizing the patient experience,” says Sam To, designer at Valence.

In the case of a digital front door, the users may be patients, families of patients, or healthcare providers. In nearly all scenarios, people value products that are easy to use and simple to set up and that follow a logical progression. This is especially true in a healthcare situation, which may be hypercharged by personal and situational stressors.

Equitable design should be at the forefront of design decisions because the healthcare organization needs to design for a wide array of users and needs. Fully understanding equitable design is critical to any digital front door strategy.

The design phase of the digital front door project should include user interviews, feedback sessions, prototyping, and more. Giving the UX/UI design team access to users early in the process can help to identify the best-case rollout strategy, reveal opportunities to differentiate from competitors, and deliver precisely the right content to users when they need it — all leading to better patient satisfaction scores.

3. Ensure System Interoperability and Integration

Healthcare organizations often use a wide array of technologies and programs. Your digital front door must connect with relevant systems. For instance, some businesses offer “online scheduling” by having the user submit a form. Then, the provider calls the patient to schedule the appointment. By seamlessly connecting an online tool with your scheduling system, you can provide a much better experience with real-time availability and no time commitment from your team.

Some programs offer easy integrations, while others require clever workarounds. However it happens, integration and interoperability are essential for creating cohesive experiences, achieving efficiency, and maximizing the value of your systems.

4. Get the Right Stakeholders Involved

Yuri Brigance, Valence’s director of software engineering, says, “This is more than a digital shift — the shift to a digital front door requires a culture shift within the organization.”

Experience has taught us that having the right people in the room can make all the difference in the success or failure of a major initiative, especially considering the role that change management plays here. People don’t resist change — they resist being changed. You must engage stakeholders from all impacted groups, from frontline workers to back-office operations. This engagement improves requirements documentation, roadmap planning, and buy-in as the work rolls out.

5. Uphold Security and Patient Privacy

Of course, all digital technology in the healthcare field demands top-notch security. However complex your system is, security and privacy help foster trust, maintain a good reputation, and ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and FHIR.

While connecting people and systems, include robust data security compliance practices, such as risk assessments, monitoring, reporting, and training.

6. Use KPIs and Feedback to Measure Success

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and feedback from patients and providers allow you to measure your success after launching a digital front door and long after implementation. Incorporate a data strategy to collect and evaluate this information. Identify metrics relevant to your goals, decide how you’ll collect data, and regularly revisit KPIs to continuously improve upon your strategy.

Get Started on Your Digital Front Door Solution

Building a digital front door requires much more than buying a new software system. This comprehensive strategy requires careful analysis and expert development for your organization’s unique characteristics. With an effective strategy, a digital front door can transform your approach to patient engagement, driving innovation, increasing revenue, and boosting patient satisfaction.

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Our JumpStart program fast-tracks business results and platform solutions. Connect with us today to enhance your customer satisfaction through a data-driven approach, drive innovation through emerging technologies, and achieve competitive advantage.

Add our brainpower to your operation by contacting our team to JumpStart your business.

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5 Ways to Build Digital Trust

Posted on May 11, 2022 by Kopius

By Malia Jacobson

Combating online misinformation and building digital trust are increasingly important for organizations doing business online. Here are a few ways that our developers and content producers work together to improve access to reliable, trustworthy content for our clients.

The Internet is filled with impressive technology platforms that we use every day. But should we trust their content? For years, content platforms evolved to focus on the technology itself, not the content within. The result: Wary consumers who distrust much of what they read online. False online information costs the global economy $78 billion each year, and three-quarters of Americans believe online misinformation is a big problem. Let’s not forget the “infodemic” of public health misinformation that researchers believe contributed to the spread of COVID-19.

Per the International Data Corporation (IDC), false information destroys the trust that fuels our digital economy. Simply put, if website visitors don’t trust your organization’s digital content, they won’t stick around long enough to become a customer.

Organizations can win and keep users’ trust by creating trustworthy, reliable content. How? As developers and content producers, we help organizations improve content quality, clarity, and accuracy with these steps.

1. Include content producers and stakeholders in platform design.

At the beginning of a project, bring stakeholders, content producers, and developers together to identify the platform’s key audiences, desired user experience (UX), and the internal process through which content will be vetted, approved, moved through QA, and posted. Defining a process to validate and approve content prior to publication helps inform the development of the right back-end content management system. This ensures that the finished platform supports the publication of content that’s worthy of users’ time—and trust.

2. Help organizations use and optimize owned media channels.

An organization’s digital marketing efforts include paid, earned, shared, and owned media channels—the organization’s own website, blog, and other outlets within its control. While earned media (press mentions) and shared media (social shares) are exciting, many organizations learn the hard way that information published on external media platforms isn’t always accurate, and fighting misinformation is a draining, costly battle. Organizations with robust owned media channels can build and keep digital trust by carefully and consistently publishing reliable, accurate content on their own platforms to serve as a source of truth for users.

3. Address racial and gender bias in content platform design.

Poor platform design can invite discrimination and reduce the integrity of digital content. Take AirBnB’s efforts to create a more transparent platform by removing anonymity for both guests and hosts during the booking process. Researchers found that revealing a potential guest’s photo before a booking request was accepted allowed hosts to discriminate based on race. To create more equitable, trustworthy, transparent platforms, consider withholding sensitive information that could enable discrimination; build awareness of algorithmic bias; and measure the effectiveness of different platform design choices. (Find more information here: Harvard Business School: How Online Platforms Can Thwart Discrimination.)

4. Bridge language barriers.

Online misinformation disproportionately targets users with language and learning differences. Organizations can work to combat online misinformation by using plain language online and addressing language barriers by integrating language translation APIs like Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and Smartling.

5. Make digital content user-friendly.

The most sophisticated platform will inhibit trust if users can’t follow along. We learned how this is especially critical for healthcare organizations, public agencies, and firms operating in the health and wellness industry during the COVID pandemic. Creating platforms that support user-friendly visual aids, symbols, and a clear pathway through complex topics helps users find and understand reliable, trustworthy information they need.

Prioritizing content quality and accuracy may be new for organizations used to focusing on platform design. But when content producers and developers work together to publish trustworthy, reliable content, organizations and their audiences win.

JumpStart Your Future with Kopius

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success. Our JumpStart program fast-tracks business results and platform solutions. Connect with us today to enhance your customer satisfaction through a data-driven approach, drive innovation through emerging technologies, and achieve competitive advantage.

Add our brainpower to your operation by contacting our team to JumpStart your business.

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14 Ways to Design and Develop a More Sustainable Website

Posted on April 21, 2022 by Kopius

By Deborah Keltner

Could you have a more sustainable website?

While the shift from analog to digital content has kept trees out of paper mills, it has undoubtedly contributed to the climate crisis because of the carbon footprint of technology. Whether it’s e-waste or energy needed for computing, the tech sector has a huge opportunity to lessen its impact on our earth’s climate.

We need to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century to keep the global temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius. You can learn more about Earth Day and its supporting events & initiatives here.

In honor of Earth Day, we are sharing a list of ideas, tips, tricks, and insights to help website designers and developers deliver more sustainable websites. We are still learning more about how to deliver more sustainable technologies, so if you have additional tips and tricks, we want to hear from you!

Let’s get started!

You are reading this on the internet! Did you know that the use of the internet alone causes emissions of approximately 2,330,000 tons of carbon and consumes 2,340,000 MWh of electricity every day? If you found this article via a web search, your search consumed about 0.3 Wh of energy and released 0.2g of carbon into the environment. It’s not much on its own, but it adds up.

Do you want to reduce your website’s carbon emissions?

Did you know: Offsetting the carbon from our website requires the work of 12 trees every year.

You can reduce the carbon emissions associated with your website by reducing the amount of electricity used to load, send, and view a web page, and then ensuring the resulting electricity required to access and use the site comes from clean, renewable resources.

Designers and developers have a lot of influence over the energy efficiency of the websites they design and create. Here are 14 tips for you to design and develop a greener an more sustainable website:

Get rid of unnecessary code, which uses computing power without benefiting users. If you have large blocks of commented-out code, don’t let it slip into production. Keep code clean and simple, avoid duplication and write efficient queries. This doesn’t just apply to the code you write, but also to the code you borrow. If you use existing frameworks and libraries, ensure that they are also refined and tailored to efficiently deliver the functionality you need and that you are not using over-built code. In cases where you are using a CMS like WordPress, avoid unnecessary plugins that add bloat and choose plugins that minimize server load and don’t add unnecessary weight on the front end.
Use compression. Some compression techniques can save data without compromising quality.
Consider programming language efficiency when choosing between programming languages. Less efficient languages have a higher carbon footprint.
Run computations on the server side. Data centers are more efficient than end-user devices.
Choose green cloud vendors. Ask whether your cloud provider uses sustainable energy sources.
Keep digital efficiency top-of-mind. Every day is Earth Day when you are prioritizing energy-efficient decisions. Our site is run on renewable energy, which helps offset our impact.
The goals of SEO are aligned with the goal of reducing energy consumption. When optimizing a website for search rankings, we help people find the information they want quickly and easily. When SEO is successful, people spend less time looking for information and visiting fewer pages that don’t meet their needs. This means less energy is consumed and the energy that is consumed is used to deliver value to the user.
Copywriting also impacts the amount of time people spend browsing your site. We don’t want people to waste time sifting through content that offers them little value, so clear and efficient copy can reduce wasted time and in turn reduce wasted energy.
Good user experience makes using the web easier and reduces the amount of energy wasted navigating to pages that don’t serve the correct purpose and trying to decipher what they should do next. Obviously, our UX Design team is here to help!
On most websites, images are the single largest contributor to page weight. The more images you use and the larger those image files, the more data needs to be transferred and the more energy is used. Regardless of any technical optimizations, designers and content creators should think carefully about their use of images.
- Does the image genuinely add value to the user?
- Does it communicate useful information?
- Could the same impact be achieved if the image was smaller?
- Could we reduce images that are not visible to the user, such as in carousels?
- Could we achieve the same effect with a vector graphic (or even CSS style) instead of a photo?
Video is the most data and processing intensive form of content. As with images, ask yourself if videos are necessary. If they are, reduce the amount of video streamed by removing auto-play from videos and by keeping video content short. A website with video playing can be one or even two orders of magnitude heavier than a website without video in terms of page weight and creates much higher load on the users CPU, resulting in vastly greater energy consumption.
Web fonts can add significant file weight to the websites on which they are used. A single font file could be as much as 250kb, and that might only be for the standard weight. If you want bold, add another 250kb. To reduce the impact on custom web fonts, designers should consider the following options: Use system fonts where possible. Fonts like Arial and Times New Roman can be used without loading any font files at all as they are already on the user’s device, and try to be frugal in the number of typefaces you choose and in the number of different weights that you use for each typeface.
Build static web pages. CMS-powered websites make queries to the website database and dynamically generate pages, so the webserver has to do work thinking about what information to send back to the user each time someone tries to load a page. That causes the server to use more energy. In some cases, it may be possible to simply server static web pages with no database at all by writing the web pages as static files in HTML, CSS, and JS, or by using a static site generator or specialist static web host to convert your CMS-powered website into static files.
Consider reducing white space and embracing dark mode. Dark websites were one of the first techniques popularized for saving energy on websites many years ago and it faded away with the advent of LCD screens, which had a permanent backlight, using the same energy regardless of the color actually visible on the screen. However, with the advent of OLED screens that light up each pixel individually, using darker colors is once again a viable technique to reduce energy on end-user devices.

If you’d like to estimate the carbon footprint of your website, this tool is easy to use. In fact, it’s how we learned that our website needs improvement (we’re currently running dirtier than 78% of similar websites and producing 2.14g of carbon every time someone visits our site). https://www.websitecarbon.com/.

You may not be able to do every single one of these things, but every action you take to produce a sustainable website adds up, so lean into greener design and engineering on Earth Day and every day!

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