A simpler way to build your digital front door

Thought Leadership

Your technology team has shouldered many new responsibilities as a result of the pandemic. Your goals go far beyond crisis response. Are you grappling with the best way to transform your current patient portal into a comprehensive digital front door patient experience?

For many healthcare organizations, digital front door initiatives pre-dated the pandemic. Consumer expectations and the explosion of telehealth have made digital front doors an even higher priority. A new report from Gartner, “It’s Time for Healthcare Delivery Organizations to Adopt a Digital-First Strategy,” addresses how complex and important digital front doors (DFDs) have become.

The report’s main point is that healthcare has flipped and is becoming an environment that leads with digital interactions, rather than in-person ones. A digital front door is a prime example. As the report states: “The DFD consists of an omnichannel communications platform (including web portals, mobile applications, SMS, and voice)…The DFD is the ‘face’ of the HDO {healthcare delivery organization} and is the core part of enabling a persistent relationship between the HDO and an individual.” 

Digital front doors – linking beyond the EHR

By now, most healthcare organizations have deployed a first or even second-generation patient portal. These portals have been closely tethered to the organization’s electronic health record (EHR). Now, earlier generation patient portals are meeting next-generation, 2020 challenges:

  • Consumers’ demands for more features and self-service access are ever-increasing.
  • Consumers expect access to all their healthcare data and services within a user-friendly mobile solution.
  • Meanwhile, many healthcare organizations are completing mergers and acquisitions—along with the nightmare of merging hundreds of different IT systems.

Data threats to patient experience

Whether they’re completing an M&A scenario, moving to a digital front door, or both, healthcare organizations are connecting clinical, billing, scheduling, customer service, and other ancillary systems.

As healthcare organizations start to expose more systems to consumers, the data quality of those systems has to be at least as good as the organization’s EHR data. Healthcare organizations face the following challenges:

  • Will fragmented patient data make it impossible for patient identity to span every system?
  • Will duplicates within the organization’s current patient matching system prevent the patient from seeing all their data across the new digital front door?

Imagine that a patient logs in hoping to see their complete record, but only sees a third of their visits, half their prescriptions, and none of their labs. There are three records for the person in the EHR and two in the pharmacy system. None of their labs are linked to their portal account.  

Resolving problems hands-on

To avoid this situation, healthcare organizations are realizing that consistent patient identity needs to be a cornerstone of digital front door initiatives. Maintaining patient identity requires constant vigilance and data maintenance. Duplicate records need to be quickly resolved, person data needs to be continually matched, and identity management needs to scale when new data sources are added. With a legacy master patient index (MPI), all of these responsibilities can require huge time commitments, as data stewards try to manually reconcile issues.

An easier way to manage patient identity

Verato works with healthcare organizations who are pursuing digital front door and data warehouse initiatives , helping them ensure that identity management works across every new platform.

Our modern, enterprise MPI uses proprietary, referential matching solutions to solve matching and duplicate record challenges in real-time and present a complete picture of the patient across your entire enterprise. Verato’s cloud-based solution is simple to deploy and integrate, with customers typically up and running within weeks.

Learn more about how Verato can help your organization smoothly implement person identity management for your digital front door.