A successful digital front door strategy provides a massive opportunity for healthcare organizations to acquire and retain customers while enhancing care and growing revenue.
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a rapid increase in the adoption of several digital healthcare trends that are driving organizations to deliver a seamless omni-channel experience. Now more than ever, healthcare customers and patients expect a service that is intuitive, efficient, personalized and easy to access.
These trends have built a strong need for healthcare organizations (HCOs) to develop a ‘digital front door’ strategy, which offers patients convenience and efficiency across their entire healthcare journey. This is achieved by taking a digital-first, consumer-focussed approach to communications and care.
What is a Digital Front Door?
The digital front door is a strategy built around utilizing everyday technologies, in order to engage healthcare patients before, during, and long after an appointment takes place. By allowing patients easy access to every touchpoint of their journey, including mobile scheduling, check-ins, and payments, providers are creating a holistic digital experience and returning control over their own healthcare to patients. The digital front door presents a valuable opportunity to providers to reach out to their patients using a blend of technologies already being used in their day-to-day lives.
A successful digital front door strategy will produce touch-points and experiences that are cost-effective, easy to access and help the patient on a proactive basis to keep patients healthy on a day to day basis - not just waiting to treat a patient when they are sick.
Benefits of a Digital Front Door
For healthcare organizations, implementing an effective digital front door can mean better patient outcomes, lower costs, higher revenue, and more.
- Grow: Digital front doors, when done right, provide virality loops that act as one-to-one acquisition efforts to help attract specific customer segments your Health System is targeting.
- Engage: Digital front doors engage customers in their care journey, helping to shift the industry from “sick care” to holistic proactive, preventative healthcare.
- Retain: Digital front doors increase customer retention and cross-pollination of services, and set a moat around your customer base (so that they are not poached by specialty/other retail oriented healthcare players (Walmart, etc.))
Why Do Some Digital Front Door Strategies Not Succeed?
According to research by Forrester, healthcare organizations are increasingly investing in digital front door strategies, however, many have not yet succeeded to create meaningful customer engagement.
Achieving higher levels of customer engagement will require organizations to truly understand how their end-users are interacting with their systems as well as their sentiment towards them. As a result, it is crucial for organizations to implement customer journey mapping and encourage modern feedback methods. This is an often overlooked step and something that can be implemented in a cost-effective manner. Only then will healthcare providers fully understand what the customer wants from a digital experience, and be able to explain which platforms are available to them and how they can be navigated.
Many “out-of-the-box” mobile and web digital health products for patients are too inflexible, do not provide an on-going relationship platform with customers, and do not provide a high-quality experience of digital care. This results in, high levels of customer churn and patients that are not proactive about managing their health.
How Can Bottle Rocket Help?
At Bottle Rocket we meet you wherever you are in your digital healthcare journey with our affordable solutions that will help drive customer satisfaction and business goals. We understand that an engaging, easy to access and proactive digital front door strategy will enhance a patients journey, and we are here to help you maintain that seamless customer experience. Contact Us Today!
