As Brooklyn's largest hospital, with 600,000 outpatient encounters, according to Rob Cimino, vice president of digital strategy and implementation, Maimonides Medical Center was an early adopter of electronic health records and best-of-breed technologies. As a result, it was regularly recognized as one of America's most wired hospitals. But adoption of various web and mobile applications led to a fragmented patient experience.
During an April webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by Verato, Mr. Cimino and Arti Pandit, chief customer experience officer at Verato, shared why and how Maimonides pursued a digital front door initiative.
Three key insights:
1. Maimonides' technology growth resulted in application silos.
As part of its strategy, Maimonides was operating multiple EHR systems and had different applications for patient registration and scheduling. "Over time, our vendor partners started introducing digital patient platforms for their applications," Mr. Cimino said. "While we understood the reason for that, it was creating a somewhat disjointed patient experience." Issues included:
- Application silos that led to difficulties tracking, understanding and engaging patients.
- No centralized control over cadence and prioritization of communications.
- Inconsistent branding and user experiences.
- Varying channels for and visibility into user support.
- Insufficient capacity for reporting and analytics to drive process improvement.
Maimonides knew these challenges needed a solution.
2. By creating a digital front door, Maimonides became the central owner of the patient account and simplified customer access. "We own the user interface, controlling the look and feel of communication centrally," Mr. Cimino said. "Now, we don't have to worry about patients getting overwhelmed with communications from separate applications, and we can control how user feedback is collected. Besides providing centralized support to our patients, we can also run analytics across all these applications to understand how they are being used."
Maimonides runs the following engines behind unqork, a core integration and interface platform:
- Verato: identity matching
- Okta: user account and multi-factor authentication
- LexisNexis: identity proofing
- R1/SCI: provider availability and self-scheduling
- Amwell: scheduled virtual visits and virtual urgent care
- Cedar: bill pay
- FollowMyHealth: patient portal
3. By creating a digitally mature organization, Maimonides has laid the foundation to reach technologically savvy consumers and has readied itself for advanced initiatives. According to Ms. Pandit, half of the U.S. population is composed of a generation that only communicates digitally. "They go to Dr. Google before they come to you," she said. "As a result, the digital maturity of an organization is critical for patient engagement and retention. Right now, this population may be looking for wellness and prevention options or self-treatment and monitoring. Eventually, they do come to brick-and-mortar facilities for actual care management, investigation, diagnosis and treatment."
Maimonides plans to expand its applications to include remote patient monitoring, clinical decision support, ER patient info, e-forms and more.
Locating all best-of-breed applications behind a single digital front door provides health systems like Maimonides with the power to better serve patients in a cohesive, easy-to-use digital environment.
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