How Digital Experience Platforms Are Changing The Way Patients Receive Services
By Alaaeldin El-Nattar, COO of Rivet Logic
The quality of care that medical patients receive is, of course, a crucial contributing factor to their health outcomes and wellness. While a medical professional’s knowledge and bedside manner have always been key variables, we’re at a point where the patient’s digital experience – connecting through online healthcare portals – cannot be an afterthought. Backed by the threat of government-enforced penalty, a poor digital experience for patients is no longer excusable. Nor should it be; patients benefit substantially when they have convenient access to their own personal health information, such as their specific diagnosis and treatment regimens, through an elegant and intuitive user interface.
Government agencies in the United States have recognized the value of user-friendly patient portals – the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has set a mandate that health organizations accepting Medicare, Medicaid and other such programs must implement portals that offer high-quality user experiences. CMS enforces this directive through automatic annual audits, which assess the patient experience delivered by a healthcare organization’s portal and scores it accordingly. Clunky, difficult-to-use portals can result in significant fines for those organizations with experiences that are not up to par.
A convenient, user-friendly patient platform in line with the CMS means being able to view and interact with individualized health solutions at any time of day, and from any internet-connected device. It also requires capabilities for communicating with medical providers directly through the interface, easily managing prescriptions or medical equipment, and fast access to any other support needed as part of a patient’s treatment plan.
Meeting these criteria means implementing a strategy capable of connecting to online care services. This often will include virtual care, where a health organization’s representative can provide not only specific information, but effective patient relationship management as well. It also means developing an intuitive, confusion-free interface, one that makes use of responsive or adaptive design to enable optimized experiences across mobile (and tablet) devices.
Personalization is a critical factor that affects the ease with which a portal interface can deliver the content and service that the patient needs. The best systems are able to adapt to the patient and offer a customized interface personalized to their specific care plans. When it comes to services provided by representatives, the portal system can readily supply detailed information and records of past interactions, so that the representative can treat the patient more quickly and with more prior knowledgeable immediately available.
Another big issue here is that – because healthcare is a sprawling and ever-evolving industry – it’s not uncommon for organizations to grapple with messy backend software full of mismatched legacy solutions that were never meant to play nice together. (As a solution provider, it’s a situation we come into all too often.) However, those backend messes must still be made invisible to the patient. Orchestrating otherwise disparate legacy software within the portal goes a tremendous way toward providing a streamlined user experience. For example, where a health organization may have separate software and user accounts for handling patient information, prescriptions, billing, appointments, partner services, etc., the patient should be able to access all tools and services from a single sign-on account.
Healthcare orgs may recognize their patients’ preferences for simple management of their own information and treatment – and their duties from a CMS compliance perspective – but, often erroneously, many choose to go it alone in creating their portal solution when they really don’t have the internal resources and expertise to fully achieve their vision. The technology to implement modern external portal solutions is widely available, popular, and a much easier path to great patient experiences when compared to creating an in-house solution from whole cloth. For example, one such technology we’ve had good experiences with is the Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP), which has a plug-in architecture that makes it simple to add new services or adapt existing ones. As a solution provider, we’ve relied on this DXP to build more feature-rich, compliant portals for healthcare clients and their patients.
Such digital solutions serve to improve processes from the perspective of care providers as well. For instance, the orthopedic device giant Smith & Nephew provides a variety of joint replacements, each of which requires insightful execution of an intricate surgical process. To improve efficiency for surgical teams, the medical equipment company turned to DXP technology to create the S2 Procedure Performance application – a platform displaying photos, videos and special instructions on a tablet in the operating room that guides teams through each step of joint replacement procedures.
Organizations investing in external portal strategies are better able to deliver personalized, natural user experiences straight out of the box, available and optimized for any device a user may prefer. Once fully implemented, such technologies give patients command over all the tools and information they could ask for. The capabilities and positive experiences that users enjoy because of these portal platforms add up to a competitive advantage for the healthcare organization, and ultimately, to meaningfully improved care.
About The Author
Alaaeldin El-Nattar is COO of Rivet Logic, a consulting, design and systems integration firm that helps leading organizations build riveting digital experiences.