Webinar recap: Building a digital front door strategy for your enterprise

Right before the new year, I had the amazing opportunity to sit on a panel with some of the healthcare industry’s leading experts in digital strategy. The session, “Beyond tactics: How to build a digital front door strategy for your enterprise,” explored a favorite topic of mine: how providers can use digital tools, data, and market intelligence to connect with patients more effectively.

It was a delight sharing the stage—and my passion for helping organizations boost acquisition and retention—with the panelists from AtlantiCare, UW Medicine, and AVIA. Our conversation was originally recorded as a webinar for eHealthcare Strategy & Trends. Members can watch the webinar or read the related article here.

Not a member? No problem. Here are my top takeaways from the session.

Modern patients are modern consumers, too

Modern patients want their care to be both comprehensive and customizable. As consumers, they’re used to taking a digital-first approach to evaluating and procuring products and services. Unsurprisingly, they want the same convenience and selection from healthcare.

AVIA’s research found that many patients—especially millennials and younger—are seeking virtual visits, online booking, and deeper personalization of care. By approaching healthcare through similar pathways established by other consumer-facing industries, patients are increasingly likely to first access a health system through a website, social media platform, or other digital avenue.

You can accommodate this behavior with a digital front door strategy, integrating multiple systems to support online consumer transactions and deliver differentiated, personalized user experiences that speak to patients’ unique needs.

The most welcoming digital front doors give patients the ability to search and compare providers by price, wait times, and ratings, then schedule an appointment within the same ecosystem. Other features like virtual triage, low-acuity care navigation, and synchronous and asynchronous telecare make it easier for patients to get the care they need while reducing providers’ resource burdens.

Effective execution requires strong cross-functional partnerships

A comprehensive digital front door strategy will include nearly every function in a typical provider organization: IT, marketing, revenue, patient experience, and clinical operations will all have a part to play, and other teams may be necessary, too.

Keeping these various functions working in unison takes effort—and, likely, a more structured arrangement than an email thread or Teams channel. For example, AtlantiCare created governance committees to align its teams around an enterprise-wide digital access initiative and eliminate redundancies caused by siloing.

In working toward a unified vision, these cross-functional partnerships should be driven by a common source of truth. Establishing this central intelligence framework is an operational hurdle as well as a technological one, but it’s worth the investment. Without a foundation of comprehensive and up-to-date data, many digital front door strategies will fail to deliver their desired outcomes.

Smart strategies start with robust intelligence

A digital front door strategy might fail for a variety of reasons: Lack of leadership buy-in, unclear vision, unrealistic expectations, or a poorly assessed market. But the key failure point for most providers is their inability to understand their patients.

Before you ever spend a dollar on patient engagement or start building that new telehealth portal, take the time to get to know who’s going to be walking through your digital front door:

• What demographic segments do they represent?
• Which of their risk factors are best served by a digital front door?
• Which social determinants of health (SDOH) affect them?
• How do they pay for their healthcare?
• What media channels do they engage with (and convert on)?

You might be thinking, wouldn’t a hospital or health system have plenty of patient data to guide their decision-making? Internal electronic health records (EHRs) can contain some useful intelligence—provided you have a system in place to standardize, de-identify, and analyze it. Even then, this data only offers a limited view of who a patient is. Most hospitals will need to bring in a third party to handle these processes effectively.

Once you’ve handled the prework, you can start to inform both current and prospective patients about the upcoming service offerings designed to make their care experience easier. If you don’t already have an up-to-date source of consumer data on your target market, you’ll need it here to identify, engage, and convert patients through the most effective channels. Again, most organizations will benefit from partnering with a dedicated data vendor to achieve this. The right data vendor can help a provider fill the knowledge gaps in their existing patient dataset while adding context about the entire market, including non-patient consumers. But the keyword here is “right.” Vendors that require long deployment times or complicated extract, transform, and load (ETL) workarounds can ultimately make more work for your IT team. They can also expose your first-party patient data to potential security breaches.

Look for a data partner that offers seamless integration with your existing dataset, enhancing your analytical capabilities without further burdening your internal resources. In fact, save yourself some time by looking no further than Definitive Healthcare.

Get the data to unlock your digital front door today

Definitive Healthcare offers the data and analytics you need to plan and execute an effective digital front door strategy. As a Medicare-qualified entity, we provide access to the historical claims data and reference and affiliation data necessary to forecast service line demand, track referral patterns, and gauge network integrity. And our population intelligence enables marketers to supercharge their media planning and consumer engagement efforts.

With our HIPAA-compliant clinical propensity models and consumer intelligence featuring demographics, SDOH models, and healthcare behaviors, you can enrich your understanding of current patients and predict the needs of incoming patients. We also offer a variety of data integration and access options, ensuring every member of your enterprise can seamlessly incorporate this intelligence into their workflow.

Want to see what this means for your organization or market segment? Schedule a complementary market analysis with one of our population intelligence experts today, and see how we can help you unlock your digital front door strategy.