Engagement Opportunities in Healthcare’s Digital Front Door

If you aren’t yet familiar with the term “digital front door,” you soon will be. Not only because we will soon define it for you, but because you will be hearing about it a lot over the next few years. The idea of the digital front door is that patients rarely just walk into their doctor’s office—instead their first interactions when seeking care are often digital. That includes first searching for an in-network physician online, then scheduling an appointment online, and then filling out patient intake forms digitally prior to their appointment.

But the experience can also extend both before and after that. For instance, prior to even looking for a doctor they may have first tried an online symptom checker. And if their doctor visit is a telehealth appointment then they may have to spend time in a virtual waiting room. Post-visit their doctor’s office may send them text messages to take a survey or alerts to view documents about their visit via their online patient portal. Patients have come to expect this level of digital ease and convenience in the rest of their lives, so now they expect it in healthcare too—and healthcare is in a hurry to catch up.

According to a May 2022 report from CB Insights, technology funding for digital front doors reached $1.9 billion in 2021, which was up 67% from the previous year. Furthermore, it is estimated to reach over $2.5 billion by the end of this year. But the question you may be asking is what does all of this mean for life sciences marketers? Well, PM360 posed that question and more to both marketers and digital front door technology venders:

  • What are the best opportunities for life sciences companies to engage with patients at healthcare’s digital front door? What can life sciences companies offer to help enhance or improve these experiences?
  • What partnership opportunities are available for life sciences companies with vendors, startups, and other companies that specialize in implementing and designing the digital front door for healthcare providers or hospital systems? What do these companies even want from potential industry partners?
  • What should life sciences companies consider when designing the digital front door to their own patient services? What do patients most value from these experiences? What can be learned from other industries?
  • As patients may be forced to deal with many digital front doors across their healthcare experience, what role can life sciences companies play in helping to better streamline this experience for patients?
  • What does the future hold for the digital front door in healthcare? What should life sciences companies be prepared for as technology and implementation further advances?

Nicholas Lucente

The opportunities to engage with patients at the digital front door are going to vary widely based on the type of disease a patient is managing. The first and most important thing life sciences companies can do is perform research and talk with patients to understand their experience and what gaps exist to making it better. In some cases, it might make sense for our industry to get involved in helping patients find providers or telehealth visits. In others, I see an opportunity to go much deeper in helping to answer nuanced patient questions around their symptoms and potential treatment journey.

Lastly, we can play a role in helping to connect patients with others who have gone through similar experiences to help assist at the digital front door. The industry today has a lot of different offerings (reminders, intake, etc.) and navigating that can be overwhelming. Hearing from others who have been through it can make a difference.

Finding the Right Partners

Some areas within the digital front door such as intake and reminders are quite mature with established companies that can help you scale and reach patients today. Others are less mature where companies are still trying to figure out what a partnership would entail. From my experience, companies in this space can benefit from our knowledge of how the industry works, our relationships, and our willingness to experiment and generate data.

The challenges we must watch for are scale and interoperability, which can seriously limit the potential for sustained success. It’s also helpful to think about where the digital front door solution is on the innovation S curve and hype cycle, along with your appetite for being an early adopter versus waiting until the solution is more established. Each approach has pros and cons to consider.

Dan Wilmer

When it comes to healthcare’s digital front door, the key is exploring ways to streamline patient access to health resources and couple it with appropriate, timely, and valuable product education and messaging. For instance, developing ways to better connect patients with local health resources. Numerous studies emphasize how difficult the American healthcare system is to navigate, including the challenges of knowing which specialists treat a condition, the availability of appointments, and whether insurance will cover the consultation—to name but a few obstacles. Research by Press Ganey validated this overarching consumer need with a February 2022 study that found nearly 90% of respondents indicated they want life sciences companies to include provider directories on their websites. More specifically, life sciences companies should consider dynamic physician directories that are personalized to a patient’s current location in real time.

The Museum Model

Another important consideration for digital front door solutions, whether in the exam room, break room, pharmacy, or infusion center, is connected, multi-stakeholder omnichannel education that includes everyone from family members to medical care givers. “The museum model” can be an apt analogy of why this is a key component in helping to improve care. None of us can be expected to be an expert in the myriad complexities of healthcare anymore than the typical museum visitor can be expected to be experts on centuries worth of art and culture. As a result, we need better guides—digital/physical manuals and apps, information kiosks, and human beings all serving different roles—to help maximize the experience. So, too, do we need to improve our health support guides and tools to optimize patients’ health journeys in an easier, friendlier, and frictionless way.

Matt Hodges

We’ve been advancing healthcare’s Digital Front Door® so long that we even hold the trademark on the term! Via the DocSquad and Zipnosis brands, the company has been quietly running one of the largest studies covering more than four million visits. We consistently place asynchronous care next to other modalities, including chat, video, and phone. We found 90% of patients prefer asynchronous over in-person care, video visits, and other forms of virtual care due to convenience, speed of care, and reduced cost.

Our solution leverages asynchronous care powered by intelligent adaptive interviews that enable faster treatment across broad population segments. Because asynchronous care has extremely low bandwidth requirements, it’s also ideal for rural and low-income populations caught in the digital divide. In addition, we utilize discrete data fields that are just as valuable for treatment as they are for triaging and routing patients to other points of care or synchronous modalities. This enables physicians to treat low-risk populations fully asynchronously and prioritize patients when a protocol identifies risk factors.

Opportunities Within a Digital Front Door Provider

A digital front door is a paradigm shift for life sciences organizations and their consumers. Traditionally, marketing budgets focused on educating consumers and providers, hoping that a solution was top of mind for the patient or physician during a visit. With the right technology partner backed by a broad provider network such as DocSquad, marketing strategies can shift to become action driven. For example, a consumer can act directly with an ad to start a virtual visit that results in a treatment plan and prescription or a referral to the appropriate point of care. The pandemic exacerbated consumer expectations by showing patients the convenience of virtual care. Failing to develop a digital front door strategy is no longer an option. If your organization doesn’t, your competitors will reap the benefits.

Tom Sullivan

While health systems have gained perhaps the most attention for opening digital front doors to patients, life sciences companies have considerable opportunities to deliver the same manner of convenience, consistency, and end-to-end integration in consumer experiences that people have become accustomed to in many aspects of their day-to-day lives. Popular tools that patients use as part of their digital healthcare experience include real-time chat, online appointment scheduling and paperwork, text reminders, and virtual appointments. A digital front door should both optimize the patient journey at every touchpoint, allowing consumers to interact with healthcare organizations in the way they prefer, and deliver personalized services akin to those from Amazon, Apple, or Netflix.

Ensuring a Streamlined Experience Across Healthcare

Life sciences companies should focus on creating digital platforms that integrate with existing data platforms employed by health systems and offer a convenient customer experience with a low barrier to entry. A multifunctional platform can connect fragmented point solutions and create a single, seamless consumer experience. Think of it as the digital infrastructure that unifies capabilities and aggregates all available health data to provide a single view of the patient through their entire health journey.

To truly enable the seamless platform experience, consumer apps need open architecture that allows them to integrate with other systems. Without open architecture, essential health data sits locked in siloed “black boxes” and is difficult to share across providers and health systems, making it easier for patients to fall through the cracks. In healthcare, the federally enforced FHIR standard represents the foundation of the open architecture we need to provide the frictionless, streamlined experience that health consumers want and expect.

Robin Wiener

For life sciences organizations conducting research involving human subjects, an interactive digital front door gives each patient or participant the ability to respond to surveys and track and report data using their own mobile devices. Patients most value the opportunity to participate without having to travel to the researchers’ location. So many patients opt out of good studies or trials because they’re not located within a metropolitan area. The digital front door expands researchers’ reach, enabling them to include those patients.

In terms of technology, mobile apps are the most used, because patients want to have information and communication accessible right in their hands. The least used functionality is looking backward at older data. Consumers’ experiences with companies such as Amazon, Starbucks, or even their own bank have shown what’s possible. So, patients now want on-demand access anytime, anywhere, on any device.

Planning for the Future

Digital front door’s future is huge. Since COVID, people realized they shouldn’t have to come into an office to do everything. They’ve seen what can be done through video conferencing. They don’t have time in their lives to do things the old way, and they’re not going to put up with it anymore. Three years ago, putting healthcare in the palm of your hand was a nice thing to have, but now it’s a must.

Life sciences organizations have to catch up and expand their ability to gather information from patients at home. They also must make sure they have great AI on the back end so they can get this information, combine it with what they have in the clinical world, and analyze it quickly to provide results about new vaccines or treatments. For some that might mean getting new technology, new databases, and new AI into their systems.

Ray Rotolo

One of the most impactful ways that life sciences companies can engage with patients at healthcare’s digital front door is to provide them the ability to connect directly with an HCP to learn more about their condition or a potential treatment when they are actively seeking information. By actually creating the link to an HCP from an existing media activation or landing page, you are able to shorten the patient’s path to having a dialogue with their physician and to understand both their condition and the potential treatment.  It also provides an ideal opportunity for providing additional educational information before the consult as well as post-consult delivery of ongoing education and prescription refill reminders.

Engaging with Patients Pre-Consult

Further, the ability to engage meaningfully with patients just prior to existing telehealth consults has never been greater. Video content can be provided while a patient waits for their consult to begin that offers important sponsored educational messaging. By delivering rich media within ad banners prior to a consult, it is possible to interact directly with the patient without taking them out of the physician visit. Life sciences companies can create a meaningful impact on the consult that is just about to take place by providing patient/physician discussion guides or digital symptom checkers, just to name a few.

Numerous surveys and market research studies have demonstrated that patients are looking for more educational information within the experience itself. This provides a unique opportunity for life sciences companies to have a significant impact on the patient and their quality of care in ways they simply cannot achieve through traditional in-person care. For conditions that require an in-person visit, similar technologies and resources are available to allow patients to schedule and provide follow-ups to their consult.

Scott Snyder

The first step in delivering a great digital front door for patient services is to offer choice in how patients and HCPs engage across a range of digital and human touchpoints. Each user will have a different digital affinity and aptitude, so it is critical to meet the needs of all patients from pure digital self-service to agent-assisted services, but use technology and AI to personalize all of these experiences and deliver the next best action across both digital and human interactions.

Most patients would prefer not to download another app if they can avoid it, so offering digital solutions that either connect into apps they already love like WhatsApp or Facebook or can be accessed through simple text/SMS solutions can improve adoption. You could also offer conversational AI and text-based solutions to enable patients and caregivers to more easily navigate their own journeys on whatever devices they choose.

Creating a Two-Way Street

At the end of the day, life sciences companies that are successful in helping streamline the experience for patients will be the ones who create the best ecosystems that simplify things for patients. This ecosystem must include every element of the patient journey, molded and shaped into a digital experience where its intuitive for patients to find exactly what they need at the right time. These ecosystems also need to be a two-way street—not only creating a great patient experience, but also creating more direct, easy-to-connect opportunities with healthcare providers.

If life sciences manufactures can solve for these two critical elements of the digital door that can help patients get what they need when they need it while also ensuring physicians can see, diagnosis, and prescribe to patients in a virtual world in a compliant manner, everyone wins.

Lynda Brown-Ganzert

Transforming healthcare needs everyone around the table, and valuable, impactful progress is made when life sciences companies partner with technology innovators. The deep subject expertise of life sciences combined with the rapid development scalability of technology is a match made in heaven. But as with all relationships, it has its challenges.

The DNA of the life sciences sector is conservative, cautious, and compliant. The DNA of technology companies is to move fast, take risks, and actively follow the build-learn-iterate model. When properly combined, some of the most exciting digital health innovation is happening at this exact juncture.

The Core Values of Partnerships

Successful partnerships, in our experience, share these core values: Patient Centricity, Trust, and Growth Mindset. One of the most rewarding aspects of working in digital health is the alignment of all stakeholders in making life better for patients. It all starts with the patient and successful partnerships know that. With a common mission, trust follows naturally with a recognition that the differences between life sciences and technology are the very things that make the magic happen.

Life sciences companies need to trust that their technology partners understand the regulatory and compliance environment. We are used to building complex, high stakes software and with your guidance we’ll help you not only streamline but also improve. On the flip side, technology companies need to learn all they can from the subject matter expertise of life sciences companies and understand the need for safety and security.

Finally, a growth mindset is critical. We’re all trying to solve problems that may not have been solved before. When we go back to the needs of the patient and innovate together, everyone benefits and lives are transformed.

Vishal Singal

Engaging with patients at healthcare’s digital front door means life sciences companies must simplify patient workflows and personalize their services. We must move from “patient cohorts” to “individual patients” and “Amazon-ize” the experience because each patient is unique. For example, provider search should give a total picture of what each doctor provides—disease specialties, channel preferences, same-day appointments, and telehealth options; patients tend to give up if they cannot easily find the right provider. Another example is tying symptom checkers into providers’ electronic medical records (EMRs). Life sciences companies can work with EMR vendors to create holistic patient information beyond clinical encounters, thus ensuring better health outcomes.

Design Tips

While designing the digital front door to their patient services, life sciences companies can also push a culture change in patients. High-quality tools focused on interoperability and effectiveness enable good outcomes. For example, gamification can enhance patient commitment by putting game elements such as a sense of community, social incentives, rewards, achievements, and personal goal setting into a healthcare context. Insightful alerts generated by AI/ML models can specify tangible actions for patients and the likely consequences of not taking the recommended steps. These alerts can help patients stay on course, resulting in significantly higher patient engagement and better outcomes.

Future Applications

The future is about integrating multiple digital front doors at different stages of the patient journey. Technologies such as “digital twins” can show patients the real-time health impact of their choices. Newer concepts such as blockchain can drive interoperability through patient data sharing, but only if simple consent language can be crafted. Patients should understand the who, what, and how of their data’s use. The key is to let patients, not companies, make the final choices when entering that digital front door.

Tiffany Mura

The most important first step for a company that wants to create a digital front door to patient services is to ask patients directly about their needs. It is often easier to assume that broader trends in the digital space apply to every situation, but these assumptions need to be validated by conducting experience research with your patients. People’s wants vary based on circumstance—i.e., a person may like a digital-first experience when shopping or getting routine primary care, but prefer a higher human touch in the case of a serious disease.

The next step is to map the holistic patient journey considering the perspectives of all key audience segments involved—patients, caregivers, healthcare providers, and payers. This journey will help you identify areas of opportunity that can be utilized in program co-creation with your target audience members. This will help ensure you are creating a program that patients will actually use and will successfully integrate with HCPs and payers within the journey.

You must also carefully consider the organizational design required to deliver on the promised experience successfully. Some building blocks may already be in place, but they need to be integrated and woven together in a meaningful way to deliver on this next level of service. While a significant up-front investment of time and resources is required, it will save you money in the long run by preventing you from investing in something your audience doesn’t want or need.

However, we still have a long way to go to create a better overall digital front door to patients’ health that truly serves patient needs by fully integrating their health information. This will take radical cross-industry collaboration and partnership, and must be designed with users—patients, caregivers, and clinicians—at the center.

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