There is little doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly reshaped the delivery of care in the United States. We have seen health systems rapidly deploy technologies that previously lacked broad adoption, like virtual care and chat assistants, seemingly overnight. However, we have also seen consumers, hungry for information about COVID-19 and available healthcare resources, eagerly adopt these methods of accessing care.
So as health systems navigate the current situation–and think about learnings from the past 6+ months–the conversation becomes how can health systems continue to invest in their digital front door to make it easy for patients to connect, transact, and interact with their organizations.
For one of our customers, Banner Health, this was a journey that began prior to COVID-19. The customer-obsessed organization, knew that in order to deliver upon their vision of “making healthcare easier so life can be better,” they would need to raise the bar on their consumer access experience. Using ProviderMatch, the organization has been able to transform their digital presence and expand convenient access online. Here are three learnings from Banner Health’s experience.
- Remove friction and barriers to support access. When accessing care, patients often face a number of barriers, such as the inability to book easily or readily access accurate provider information online. When revamping their digital front door, it was important for Banner to create a friction-free experience and find a partner that offered search and scheduling tools that were easy, convenient, and action-oriented for consumers. Partnering with Kyruus, they were able to give consumers not only greater visibility into their provider network, but also user-friendly tools to take action, thus removing additional steps that typically hinder patients from finding the right care.
- Make collaboration and communication a priority. While the technology itself played a foundational role in Banner Health’s digital front door initiative, the building blocks of success were effective collaboration, communication, and change management. To make sure provider profile information was accurate, the health system established a common set of goals around the initiative and worked closely with their providers to accomplish them. It was this approach, Heather Francis, Banner Health’s Clinical Director of Customer Integration Strategy & Design, noted that “helped us build a basis of trust as we drove change.”
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- Put the consumer in the driver’s seat. Like consumers in any other industry, today’s healthcare consumers want to be able to find care when and where they need it. Understanding the importance that consumers place on convenience and the rising interest in online booking, Banner prioritized launching self-service scheduling on its website for new and existing patients. They also used the ProviderMatch APIs to create service line and location pages to help consumers filter search results by their specific needs while tying all searches back to a single source of information.
As a result, Banner Health was able to increase organic find-a-provider traffic by 35%, book 38% of online appointments after hours, and achieve a 99.8% accuracy rate for online booking. To learn more about their story and see more of their positive results, download the Banner Health Case Study.
