As Brooklyn’s largest hospital, with 600,000 outpatient encounters, according to Rob Cimino, Vice President of Digital Strategy and Implementation, Maimonides Medical Center was an early adopter of electronic health records and best-of-breed technologies. As a result, it was regularly recognized as one of America’s most wired hospitals. But adoption of various web and mobile applications led to a fragmented patient experience.
During a webinar hosted by Becker’s Hospital Review and sponsored by Verato, Mr. Cimino shared why and how Maimonides pursued a digital front door initiative.
Adding technologies for advancement resulted in application silos.
As part of its strategy, Maimonides was operating multiple EHR systems and had different applications for patient registration and scheduling. “Over time, our vendor partners started introducing digital patient platforms for their applications,” Mr. Cimino said. “While we understood the reason for that, it was creating a somewhat disjointed patient experience.” Issues included:
- Application silos that led to difficulties tracking, understanding and engaging patients
- No centralized control over cadence and prioritization of communications.
- Inconsistent branding and user experiences
- Varying channels for and visibility into user support
- Insufficient capacity for reporting and analytics to drive process improvement
Becoming the central owner of the patient account simplified customer access.
“We called this our digital front door initiative and our goal was to get to a place where the applications and our vendors develop service engines were behind our digital front door. We own the user interface, controlling the look and feel of communication centrally,” Mr. Cimino said.
“Now, we don’t have to worry about patients getting overwhelmed with communications from separate applications, and we can control how user feedback is collected. Besides providing centralized support to our patients, we can also run analytics across all these applications to understand how they are being used.”
Laying the foundation for today’s savvy consumers and easily advance initiatives in the future.
“Over 20% of the patients doing self-schedule appointments through the app are new to our institution. So they are not only looking for us – they are looking for a digital means to connect with us, finding it and using it” Mr. Cimino said.
“What we’ve accomplished in building the new application, in phase one, was really about the core infrastructure. I think we’ve done a good job at selecting and integrating a really solid infrastructure that’s serving us now, but also will carry us into the future. And we’re engaging the entire medical center in this project and in our roadmap, so that we don’t lose track of opportunities.”
Maimonides plans to expand its applications to include remote patient monitoring, clinical decision support, ER patient info, e-forms and more.
Watch this Webinar to hear more from Rob Cimino discussing how Maimonides Medical Center Supercharged their Digital Strategy through Patient Identity.
When you’re ready, schedule a Strategy Session with Verato to evaluate your current patient identity status and how we can help you accelerate your digital health initiatives.
