Why Does Your Digital Front Door Need to Be Mobile?

Recently, Gozio attended the NEHIMSS Spring Conference. While there, I presented a session on why it is important to think about your mobile strategy for your digital front door. I wanted to take a minute to recap some of the key insights from that presentation. And I also wanted to share the details of the conversation I had with the attendees at the end of the session after someone asked me, “What’s next?”

First, there are a lot of good reasons why you should have a mobile-first approach to your digital front door. A new study of patient engagement trends conducted by Gozio at the end of 2023 showed that:

• 65% of patients are already trying to manage their healthcare experience through their mobile device.
• 89% of patients would like to manage their healthcare through a single platform.
• 50% of those patients would prefer to access that platform on their smartphone. 

Meeting the expectations of patient when it comes to their digital experience is more important than ever, because:

• 90% of patients say they may switch providers that don’t deliver a satisfactory digital experience. 
• 50% of patients say a bad digital experience with a provider ruins the whole experience.
• 26% said they would switch to a new healthcare provider for a better digital experience.

When a health system loses a patient due to a poor experience, there is a significant cost. Each patient in a health system has a lifetime value of $200,000. 

Your patients use their mobile device for everything, but the research from Gozio shows that many health systems are still focused on web-based experiences. That survey, and the CHIME Digital Health Most Wired survey from 2023, showed that patients are being asked to access too many tools in too many places and they feel frustrated.

The solution is to bring all a health system’s patient-facing tools into a single premium mobile experience that patients can use to navigate their entire journey.

This concept resonated with the attendees in the session, and there were a number of great questions. The one that spawned a meatier conversation, however, was the one about what comes next. This is a question that we get a lot. 

First, I’d like to say that it’s hard to know what comes next. It is always changing as the industry changes. However, I shared my two thoughts on what seems to be taking center stage now as we look into the next year or two.

Not surprisingly, one of those is AI. Where AI seems to be having the biggest impact is helping support patient access and call centers. The solutions used there can often be embedded in a website and mobile app as well. We have done this working with Hyro and Baptist Health Jacksonville. This solution allows patients to ask for a provider, within 10 miles, who speaks Spanish and they get an immediate response with options and the ability to book an appointment. It can also answer questions about things like where to get a flu shot. It is a wonderful patient experience to be able to pull up your health system’s app, ask a question, and get an answer in seconds. I definitely foresee this becoming commonplace over the next couple years. Download the Baptist Access app to see this tool in action.

My second thought was around personalization. More and more people have been talking about the need to bring more personalization to the digital front door. This process is more complicated than you might think. You have to decide if you do that by gating the whole experience and tapping into data from your EHR or do you use some combination of other tools such as a CRM like Salesforce or MDM like Verato combined with an authentication tool like Clear. How personalized do you get? Do you show you know who the patient is and surface things like they are overdue for their colonoscopy? Or do you keep it high level and let them choose to opt into a deeper experience. Anyone who wants to start thinking about a personalized digital front door that lives on a patient’s phone will have to ask all these questions and more. But that personal experience is coming in one form or another. And it will improve the patient experience and support key goals around a preventative model versus a reactive one.

The mobile patient experience today already has the potential to make navigating the patient journey easier from seeing urgent care wait times to booking specialist appointments to navigating from home to parking to the point of care. No one can know what the future really holds, but right now it looks like the next phase of mobile will bring even more seamless, personalized experiences for patients to help them manage their healthcare.