Healthcare IT News: hospital achieves success with digital front door

According to a new article in Healthcare IT News, Nebraska-based Children’s Hospital & Medical Center launched its Children’s GO mobile app that combines a variety of digital offerings into one single "entrance." In the article, the author, Bill Siwicki talks to CIO, Jerry Vuchak about the challenges and solutions around building the new digital front door.

"Children’s Hospital & Medical Center needed a way to engage patients and families virtually with a resource that would allow them to more promptly get the health answers they need when questions or complications arise, he added. It also needed to deepen connections with their child’s care team by enabling them to correspond remotely on a regular basis, ideally leading to better outcomes and experiences.

'We wanted to tie together all of our digital services for patients and families into a single umbrella app to create a more integrated care experience,' Vuchak explained. 'Previously, parents had to log on to numerous apps or websites to find the information they were looking for, which creates a confusing and inconsistent experience.'

'We worked with a vendor to determine our short-term and long-term goals for a unified digital offering,' Vuchak said. 'We also sought feedback from our patient and family advisory councils to ascertain what they valued the most in a digital sense.'

'Then we began to design a platform that could not only provide a more tightly integrated care experience for patients and families, but also reduce the administrative load for our team,' he noted. 'In an era when teams increasingly suffer from burnout, finding ways to decrease the administrative burdens of care is critical to protecting employee satisfaction.'

Read more about their solutions and how they are achieving an improved patient experience in the full article.