What is the digital front door?
Digital front door describes a set of interactive and transaction-ready capabilities to enable digital interactions between patients and health systems throughout the care journey, from pre-service to follow-up and payment. When leveraged appropriately, a digital front door strategy can improve patient experiences, drive access, and reduce (or eliminate) reliance on paper-based workflows and manual processes.

Buyer’s guide to the digital front door

AVIA Marketplace's 2024 Top Digital Front Door Companies, including:
Why the digital front door matters
What leading solutions offer
AVIA Marketplace’s top digital front door companies

Top Digital Front Door Companies Report 2024

Patients demand convenient healthcare access akin to online services. A robust digital front door, integrating online scheduling, telehealth, patient portals, symptom checkers, and payment management, is crucial. It offers a competitive edge by enhancing accessibility, patient loyalty, brand perception, market reach, revenue, and leveraging data for insights, ensuring health systems meet modern expectations and stay competitive.

Modern patients rightly demand that healthcare access be as straightforward as ordering a meal online or hailing a ride, which is still far from the norm.

The Competitive Edge: Why Every Health System Needs a Robust Digital Front Door

According to a report from Accenture, patients are increasingly switching providers, and at least a portion say it’s because of the digital experience. In fact, the report goes on to show that digital engagement is a strong predictor of loyalty. Increasingly, patients say they are less likely to stay with a provider who doesn’t provide a good digital experience, and a bad digital experience effects how they feel about their entire healthcare interaction. In other words, great care or bedside manner doesn’t mean a patient will stay if the rest of their experience doesn’t meet their needs. 

The Right Approach to Your Digital Front Door Enhances Patient Satisfaction and Retention

Conversational AI is an advanced technology that allows machines to understand, process, and respond to human language in a way that is both contextually relevant and interactive.   Within the healthcare sector, this technology is increasingly deployed to automate routine tasks and deliver a more robust and personalized patient experience. Conversational AI leverages a combination of machine learning, natural language processing, and occasionally deep learning to interpret and respond to user inputs, with a conversational user interface that mimics human interaction. Digital health companies deploy conversational AI through chatbots, voice assistants, messaging apps, or any other type of platform where natural language interactions occur. 

A buyer’s guide to conversational AI

Virtual nursing is the ability to remotely provide nursing services through an electronic platform. Nurses (RNs and NPs) provide a variety of virtual tasks while assessing, planning and evaluating patient outcomes, intervening as appropriate utilizing the Nursing Process.  The key difference is they are interacting virtually.  We are currently seeing a rising interest in providing Virtual Nursing bedside support to staff nurses.

A buyer’s guide to virtual nursing

As health systems compete for the commercial consumer against new entrants and big tech that are increasingly entering the marketplace, there is a heightened need to deliver a convenient route for a person who is searching online for care to schedule and access same day care. Key use cases center around consumers searching for symptoms, searching for symptoms online, trying to make an appointment online, and wanting to access same day or virtual care. In order to address this collective set of...

Digital Front Door (DFD)

Low Acuity Care Navigation Tools

Synchronous telemedicine tools provide on demand or scheduled care options to consumers, as demonstrated in two-way consults between a patient and their medical provider and/or specialist at a remote site.

Synchronous Virtual Visit Tools

These tools create a convenient on-ramp to improve new patient volume, acquisition, utilization, and experience. Finding a provider and scheduling an appointment is often the first interaction patients will have with a health system. While many health systems use scheduling capabilities within their EHR, this misses the opportunity to meet consumer expectations for online access and convenience.
Whether the focus is on acquisition or reducing no shows and increasing convenience, scheduling is central. Technology solutions range from a notification queue for the health system to call and confirm the appointment to full integration that allows patients to schedule on mobile and take advantage of open slots in real-time (load balance, cut wait times).

Consumer Scheduling Tools

Asynchronous Telehealth provides an avenue for patients to access care for low acuity conditions or triage to appropriate levels of care. Using algorithms and a structured clinical interview that a patient accesses on their own device (e.g. smart-phone, tablet, or web) the solution takes the patient symptoms and creates a SOAP note with suggested diagnosis and treatment options for a provider to to review and select treatment, generating appropriate orders and prescriptions. These solutions can be used to augment capacity for primary care, and can also be used to support patient self-triage in the ED waiting room.

Asynchronous Virtual Visit Tools

Ratings and Reviews Transparency Tools

Virtual triage tools use advanced AI and NLP capabilities to allow consumers to communicate with a chat bot in the same way they would with a medical provider. These tools provide consumers with an analysis of their symptoms and can navigate them to the best sites of care to meet their current needs.

Best Digital Front Door (DFD) Products

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