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The patient’s digital journey is often confusing and frustrating. Five vendor requirements and five cloud capabilities can make the experience easy to navigate, amplify the health system’s brand, and build trust.
A patient’s digital journey should be easy to navigate, amplify the health system’s brand and build trust at every step. For many, that isn’t the case.
Take, for example, the experience of Emily, a mom who wanted to make an appointment at a clinic after her daughter was injured playing soccer. She tried the clinic’s website, then needed to call the clinic, after which she received a text message asking her to fill out forms before arriving at the visit. At the clinic, she was asked to fill out the forms again — and then she was asked a third time when the clinic doctor referred her to an imaging appointment where the same forms were needed. This kind of frustrating experience is common.
Delivering positive customer experiences is crucial for providing care access, making it easier to provide accurate health information, and establishing and maintaining patient relationships. Digital solutions can help create better care outcomes, but given the rapid emergence of AI-based vendor solutions offering differentiated experiences and capabilities, healthcare systems may struggle to develop seamless, in-house solutions.
Common integration challenges for healthcare providers
Delivering a unified digital healthcare experience is challenging when integrating an assortment of digital solutions provided by a variety of vendors. When not done right, it can feel like a patchwork of solutions and steps to find care, schedule appointments, complete forms and make payments. It gets even more complicated when it comes to managing a health condition and medications, communicating with care teams and accessing telehealth or digital therapeutics.
Healthcare providers often face three main integration challenges in providing a consistent digital experience.
User experience fragmentation
Many patients and providers navigate through a maze of interfaces and functionalities that lack consistency and fluidity. That can be confusing and frustrating, and it makes users feel uncomfortable and insecure.
Data discontinuity
A non-integrated digital solution can lead to fragmented data and requires users to enter data multiple times. The quality of the data is negatively impacted and users can become frustrated. This lack of continuity can weaken the trust patients place in the health system’s ability to provide personalized and informed care.
Data inconsistency in AI-powered solutions
Establishing a strong data integration strategy is critical when incorporating AI-based vendor solutions into the digital health ecosystem. AI-powered solutions such as personalized recommendations, intelligent chatbots and predictive analytics can significantly enhance the user experience and improve care outcomes. But because these solutions use complex algorithms and require seamless data exchange across systems to function, integrating AI-based vendor solutions present unique challenges in terms of data consistency and interoperability. Healthcare systems should make sure data flows seamlessly across different vendor solutions and internal systems. Inconsistent or siloed data can hinder the effectiveness of AI algorithms, leading to inaccurate insights and suboptimal user experiences.
How vendors and custom cloud solutions can help
With these integration challenges in mind, health systems should focus on creating a platform that facilitates integrations. The resulting flexibility can help health systems weave together the most effective vendor-based requirements and custom cloud solutions.
Five essential vendor-based requirements
When integrating vendor-based solutions, health systems should work with vendors to adhere to a minimal set of requirements to aid in creating a seamless user experience.
Five important cloud capabilities
Healthcare systems should limit the variety of technologies used to enable a seamless digital experience. Close collaboration and “just-enough” governance among design teams, front-end engineers and architects can help achieve this goal. Collectively, they should build and maintain a standards-based system that allows for experiences that use a variety of data, driven by content and APIs. Some aspects of the experience can be custom built, others can be provided through vendor solutions. A seamless digital experience can be enabled by cloud-native based capabilities.
Significant progress has been made in the industry on standardization of interfaces (FHIR specification/standard for healthcare data exchange), which can further enable health systems to create digital experiences tailored to the unique needs of individual health systems.
By carefully navigating these considerations, health systems can establish a digital experience that helps provide better access and, ultimately, better care. The path involves a strategic blend of leveraging market solutions and customizing where it counts, all while keeping the user at the forefront of digital health initiatives. Health systems can take the next step by evaluating their digital strategies and investing in a platform that can provide flexibility for current and future digital use cases.
Main authors: Abbas Mooraj and Daan Runderkamp. Chelsey Henderson also contributed to this article.
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