For those organizations that are ready to begin their journey to launch online scheduling, be sure to take into consideration these 5 key steps:

1. ESTABLISH A SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH FOR PROVIDER, SERVICE, AND LOCATION DATA

To help ensure that patients are booking appointments with the appropriate providers for their clinical needs you will need to first build out a single source of truth for your data that not only houses accurate, up to date information, but also includes elements that matter most to consumers when selecting care—such as clinical expertise, appointment availability, and insurances accepted.

Real-World Spotlight: Geisinger Health System understood the importance of getting their provider data in place before they could reap the benefits of online scheduling. After establishing a single source of truth and ongoing validation processes, they saw a 30% increase in their provider data accuracy.

2. ENGAGE CROSS-FUNCTIONAL STAKEHOLDERS ACROSS YOUR ORGANIZATION

Online scheduling touches many departments and stakeholders within an organization. Don’t wait until after you launch to gather feedback and opinions from these groups, involve them from the start. Doing so will set your project up for success by opening clear paths of communication and ensuring that everyone is working towards the same goals.

Real-World Spotlight: In order to meet their goal of enhancing the digital patient experience, Inspira Health aligned a cross functional team consisting of leaders from marketing, IT, clinical, and administration. Establishing this partnership early-on enabled them to successfully collaborate in order to meet and exceed their goals.

3. CREATE A STANDARDIZED, REPEATABLE LAUNCH PLAN

Set your organization up for success by taking a phased approach. Prepare to launch with a smaller subset of your providers to ensure a smooth roll-out and to analyze how things are going and gather learnings along the way. Once this is done, document what worked well and use that as your guide as you continue to expand your offerings.

Real-World Spotlight: Banner Health chose to launch online scheduling as part of a phased rollout—scaling within six months to eventually offer online scheduling for more than 300 primary care physicians resulting in over 4,000 online bookings. These results allowed them to make a case for further expansion within primary care as well as amongst specialists.

4. BROADEN BOOKING OPTIONS ACROSS SPECIALTIES, APPOINTMENT TYPES, AND SERVICES

After you’ve seen success with your initial launch of online scheduling, broaden your offerings to include additional specialties and services. Being able to showcase your success with certain providers will not only help to get others on board, but it will also serve as a great business case when trying to get funds allocated to the project if you have plans to further expand.

Real-World Spotlight: Northeast Georgia Health System went live with online appointment scheduling, initially for primary care, and later expanded to include both cardiology and preventive gynecology. In less than a year, they have been able to demonstrate ROI, which has in turn allowed them to develop plans to further expand their online scheduling to additional specialties as well as mammograms.

5. OPTIMIZE AND EXPAND UPON SELF-SERVICE CAPABILITIES

Recent research has shown that consumers now access a variety of sources when looking for care online. To ensure that you’re reaching the most consumers possible, consider extending your reach to a mobile app or other third party sites that are most frequented.

Real-World Spotlight: Legacy SCL Health (now Intermountain) is leveraging the ProviderMatch API to power provider search, match, and scheduling in their mobile app as well as a virtual assistant on the main Legacy SCL Health website, allowing them to extend the consumer friendly experience to additional channels.

The post Getting Started with Online Scheduling: 5 Key Steps for a Successful Launch appeared first on Kyruus Health.

Fast forward to 2023, and the New Jersey-based physician group has expanded to include more than 60 providers and offices in Margate, Marmora, Northfield, Ocean City, and Somers Point — with specialties from internal medicine and neurology to urology and orthopedics. Its newest office, located in Mays Landing, opened this past September. 

The healthcare landscape has also changed in numerous ways since 2012. Digital health pervades the industry, with most patients expecting their providers to offer products and services that are quick and convenient. It has led to more of a focus on connected care, which enables real-time, electronic communication between a patient and a provider. 

Using technologies like mobile apps, telehealth, remote patient monitoring (RPM), and secure text messaging, connected care allows care to be personalized and patient-centered. Just as important, it markedly helps promote patient engagement and access to care, especially for those in rural areas of the U.S. 

These consumer and technology trends led Shore Physicians Group to promote a new mission statement: “Keeping You Well Connected.” As the statement notes, the goal is to “deliver superior medical outcomes by connecting the people and communities we serve with the highest-quality, most technologically advanced, and compassionate care in the region.”  

A key component of this mission was digitizing its check-in process. The physician group wanted a solution that would seamlessly integrate with athenaNet, was easy to use for both staff and patients, and offered end-to-end training, support, and ongoing responsiveness to needs. The choice was Epion Health. 

What stood out for Shore Physicians Group? Among other advantages, Epion’s deep and discrete integration exceeded the capabilities of other vendors and was the only one that did not require a separate dashboard to reconcile patient-entered data. 

Since implementing our cloud-based, HIPAA-compliant patient engagement platform, Shore has achieved a patient utilization rate of nearly 90 percent and a 37 percent increase in time-of-service (TOS) collections. Check out our newest case study to find out more about how the physician group has improved the patient experience and established uniformity and consistency across all of its locations.  

The post Shore Physicians Group: Achieving a Mission to Keep Patients Well-Connected appeared first on Kyruus Health.

MATT’S STORY

“I’m a big runner, which means I’ve had my fair share of injuries over the years, including many stints in physical therapy. So when my right hip began bothering me, I tried to treat myself for about four months, until the nagging numbness in my right leg and hip finally pushed me to see my primary care physician.

I didn’t think twice when he referred me to the physical therapist in his clinic. After two quick visits, I was given some exercises to do on my own and told to check in after a few weeks if things hadn’t improved. I knew this was different from all the other physical therapy regimens I had been on in the past, but I was excited not to have to go to his office multiple times a week and didn’t ask questions. Unfortunately, the exercises turned out to be far too aggressive. After a couple weeks, I was in worse shape. With my mid-back thrown out and my leg in severe pain, I went back to my primary care doctor. That led to a recommendation for an MRI and crutches.

The first available MRI appointment was two weeks away. I was in such agonizing pain that I knew I couldn’t wait. I also knew my health plan’s website has tools for finding cost-effective, in-network providers and scheduling appointments. It even offers gift cards when you choose certain providers. So I logged in to find imaging center options that also had openings right away. I found out that the total for an MRI at imaging centers in the Portland, Oregon, area ranged from $380 to more than $1,500. It turned out that the least expensive option on the list had an appointment available three days later and also let me earn a gift card.

“The thing I learned most from this experience is how much it pays off—both for my health and my wallet—to use my plan’s online tools to do a little research.”

When I was charged for my MRI, I was pretty amazed that the estimated cost I saw on my health plan’s website was less than $1 different from what I actually paid. And while I paid $77 out of my pocket, the reward my health plan gave me for choosing that facility was $50, so it covered most of the cost.

Using my health plan’s website to get information was quick and easy. The thing I learned most from this experience is how much it pays off—both for my health and my wallet—to use my plan’s online tools to do a little research.”

Interested in learning more about rewarding healthcare possibilities? Request a demo of HealthSparq Rewards

The post Rewarding Healthcare Choices: Matt’s Story appeared first on Kyruus Health.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.”

3. 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.

The post Insights from Banner Health: How to Transform Your Digital Front Door appeared first on Kyruus Health.