Alli Chandra, Senior Manager, Consulting Service, AVIA and Jason Lineen, Senior Vice President, Consulting Practice Leader, AVIA

For example, our patient portal activation rate across our established patient base is approximately 75%, which far exceeds the national average.

Building a robust “digital front door” for a large multi-specialty group representing 1100 clinicians across over 50 medical and surgical specialties is more complex than adding a “Buy Now” button for an online store front. There are numerous people, process and change management efforts to be undertaken. From a technology standpoint, the key foundational step is the development of a robust online provider directory and a consistent enterprise-wide approach to provider data governance. By establishing a central, accurate directory that contains the details consumers want (e.g., office locations, accepted insurance plans, educational background)and configuring search abilities to help filter and prioritize based both on known and inferred needs (e.g. accepting new patients, scope of clinical practice, schedule availability), organizations can both draw in more patients through search engines and enhance the quality of patient/provider matching.

Organizations with a provider directory digital capability can create a single point of access for provider information that pulls information from multiple systems including credentialing, practice management, and similar databases. They can publish those data elements for consumers to access.

If making clinicians “discoverable” online is the first step, the second step is allowing consumers to register online and to schedule their own appointments. Culturally, allowing consumers to self-schedule is challenging for the healthcare industry principally due to the fear that patients will end up scheduling with the wrong practitioner – a dissatisfier for both parties (e.g., booking an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon specializing in hip/knee replacements to evaluate shoulder pain). Even more basic but difficult is getting a group of clinicians to move to standardized appointment types and schedule templates.

While adding these capabilities and linking them to an electronic health record can be complex, it can be done and the results being achieved by first movers are impressive. It is time for healthcare to catch up to other consumer-facing industries and open their digital front door.

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