Does Your Health Care System Rely Just On A Digital Front Door Or A Bunch Of Side-Doors (And Secret Doors)?

As Health Care moves to a more consumer centric approach we often hear the buzz words of “Digital Front Door” implying our patients (and consumers) tend to come through a main pathway to learn about our health care system.  For me, the digital front door primarily is our online web presence and our mobile apps (we currently utilize both MyUNC Chart and our UNC Health mobile app).

Each of these front doors serve a purpose – from a web perspective, it is mainly about providing an overview of the health care system and easy access to find a provider and schedule care.  We also provide health content and other useful information, but I believe consumers who visit our websites are looking for general information or want to know more about who we are as a health care system.

Our other main “digital front door” are our mobile applications, MyUNC Chart mobile app is the patient portal from our Electronic Health Record vendor, Epic – this provides patients with clinical information and access to their medical record.  We have also introduced a separate mobile app called UNC Health that provides a number of services similar to our web sites, but due to the nature of a mobile app, there are a number of native features that tap into the power of the mobile device ranging from wayfinding (getting point to point directions including inside of the hospital), to identifying where the closest Urgent Care is with real time wait times shown.  Now if you are at the soccer game and your children sprains their ankle, you can find urgent care closest to you with the shortest wait time.

IQVIA’s Digital Health Trends 2021 report from July, 2021, states consumer apps remain the most widely available and used digital tool with over 90,000 new digital health apps added in 2020 — an average of more than 250 apps per day — resulting in over 350,000 apps currently available.  An interesting stat provided is 94% of all digital health apps have less than 50,000 downloads, so if you can get someone to download your app, you want to be sure it adds enough value for them to continue to use it.

So having these traditional digital front doors is great, but how about those side doors or even secret doors?  Digital Health platforms now offer consumers and patients a variety of tools to access their health care system, from chat bots to unified communications to virtual care and all of these can offer another “door” for patients and consumers to access our health care system.  Patients now can access their digital experience through multiple access points – these side doors (or secret doors) sometimes are more effective than trying to drive everyone through your traditional digital front door.

One example of how we used this side door approach is with our text appointment reminders where patients are notified of upcoming appointments via text.  When the patient confirms their appointment, they receive another text that has a “smart link” included in the body of the text - once the patient clicks the link it will take them to the appropriate mobile app store so that they can download our UNC Health mobile app.  When we first implemented this side-door approach to provide quick access to our traditional digital front door - our UNC Health mobile app, we saw app downloads increase by 443%. 

By linking traditionally disparate digital solutions into a cohesive patient experience adds immediate value to the patient.  Behind the scenes there was some technical work that had to happen, but from the patient’s experience, this all felt seamless like a single app experience.  This ended up being our most successful path to bring our patients and consumers to our traditional mobile front door.  One key reason this was so successful is that it provided a specific call-to-action that was very relevant for the patient in the moment, as getting directions to their appointment is pretty useful – especially when going to a new location.  To further enhance the user experience, now when a patient downloads the UNC Health mobile app it is pre-populated with the appointment location so the user doesn’t even need to search the app.  Since some text appointment reminders come 7 or 3 days before their appointment, patients can save the appointment reminder to their mobile phone calendar – now when it’s time for their appointment, they simply click on a link within their mobile calendar placeholder to open the app pre-populated with their location and off they go!

This is just one example of how to use a side door for patients to access your digital health offerings – really, any touchpoint within the patient’s digital journey offers the opportunity to bring them through the “door” into your broader digital experience. 

For Health Care systems that have implemented a number of digital services, allowing these products and platforms to work together behind the scenes to create a frictionless patient experience so that one experience leads to other will create multiple doors (front, side and secret) for patients to access your health care services.  Done right it will feel natural for this seamless experience to help patients and consumers find the best way to access health care services and content that meets their needs.