Building a Digital Front Door Healthcare Strategy

Patient communication is essential, but in a world where remote care is a must, digital outreach is paramount. Learn how a digital front door strategy can help build out more remote outreach.

With social distancing being the norm today and likely in the future, care facilities have been rather receptive to hardware such as medical tablets and other portable workstation solutions capable of meeting patient needs while also keeping a safe distance.

Many providers entering the telehealth arena are realizing it’s not enough to simply provide telehealth hardware, consideration needs to be made for every instance of digital interaction with a patient, not just appointments.

The Importance of a Digital Front Door Strategy

Now, more than ever before, it’s become essential to talk to and inform patients, address concerns, and calm fears. All of this goes towards helping patients feel confident and safe in keeping their appointments. A digital front door strategy achieves this by optimizing all instances of remote patient outreach.

The benefits of this sort of communication and messaging for patients has legs for a time well after COVID as well. Transparency with patients and messaging that encourages them to stay on top of their health will encourage higher appointment retention rates, improved patient outcomes, and a myriad of other benefits.

What Outreach is Included in a Digital Front Door Healthcare Strategy?

Website

According to WebMD, 20% of the population suffers from this fear, often referred to as “white coat syndrome”. And these fears have only been compounded with recent worries of infection. People fear the unknown, they fear getting sick, they fear hearing bad news; But, all instances of irrational fear like this provide an opportunity to educate.

Consider utilizing your facility’s website to inform prospective patients on updates made to your care and operational policies. Reading about these new policies can be very consoling for the average patient who fears coming in to treat their condition. Blogs can also be a powerful tool to host on your website as they can be a wonderful forum for addressing common fears and concerns that impact your patient-base.

Telehealth Capabilities

Appointments in themselves are instances of interaction with a patient that can be optimized. The easier you can come into contact with a patient remotely, quell their concerns, and inform them, the better. And in order to optimize in that way, the right hardware and policies are necessary.

Highly portable workstations such as a medical cart computer or a medical grade tablet can make telehealth appointments much more convenient by allowing you to quickly transport staff workstations to secluded rooms where patients feel more comfortable sharing sensitive information.

Patient Education Tools

Patients want to play an involved, active role in how their care is run and patient education materials have undergone a recent revamping across many facilities as they begin to adapt to the more involved patient.

Once you have what you feel to be a valuable, educational resource for your patients, you can disperse it remotely through a number of digital avenues. If you have your patient’s email or phone number, that can allow for you to send the resource straight to a device they check daily. You can even share these resources through patient portal apps or, if they’re more general in nature and not custom to each patient, they can even be posted on your site as a downloadable PDF.

Patient Portal

The patient portal is an invaluable resource for your staff and patients. This should be where your patients go if they have any questions or concerns that are more specific to their particular health.

Patients appreciate being able to reach out to their physicians and building out a relationship with them. Not only does this help console them and their fears, HIPAA-authorized messaging across the patient portal has also proven to be an amazing tool towards an effective remote patient monitoring program.

A Digital Front Door Healthcare Strategy Consoles Patients

Like we emphasized above, a digital front door healthcare strategy isn’t just about telehealth and remote appointments. What the recent state of the world has shown us is just how potent remote communication and interaction can be between provider and patient. As more and more means of communicating with patients become available, providers are beginning to understand how efforts made to address patients before they even require a visit can improve appointment retention, patient outcomes, readmission rates, and so much more. For more information on how your facility can get started with a digital front door strategy, contact an expert from Cybernet today.