Consumers often want to better manage their healthcare, but they don’t know where to start – where can I get the support I need? Why am I waiting so long for my appointment? Who do I need to speak to? What happens after my appointment? For all of these reasons people can be left feeling helpless, frustrated and dissatisfied.

A healthcare digital front door empowers people to interact with their health system effectively and efficiently at a time and place convenient to them. It provides people with access to all of the tools needed to manage their own, as well as their dependents’ health and wellbeing, from a central location, and seamlessly guides them through their health journey.

Empowering consumers with this type of access to digital services in healthcare promises to be even more transformative than online and mobile banking were to the finance industry.

Providing high-quality healthcare, digitally

Whilst patient experience transformation of healthcare systems is long overdue, the global COVID-19 pandemic emphasised the need for investment in technology to enable high-quality care and to deliver new ways for people to interact with their health systems.

With the e-health industry attracting increasing investment and attention, we now have the right building blocks in place to drive the change that consumers have long desired. The requirement during the peak of the pandemic for social distancing – to keep people away from hospitals and clinics – means that a ‘digital first’ strategy has finally become widespread and mainstream.

Studies have shown that patients who have access to and engage with patient engagement technologies see measurable improvements in the management and outcomes of their chronic conditions. A healthcare digital front door takes this many steps further, by empowering individuals with access to a suite of enhanced tools and technologies, available from their first point of contact and throughout every subsequent interaction they have with the health system.

The healthcare digital front door enables a truly personalised healthcare experience for individuals and helps to simplify a consumer’s access to what can often be overwhelming, disjointed, and complicated health systems. It is a comprehensive technology solution that empowers citizens and enables them to interact with the health system at a time and place convenient to them.

Add to this the power of machine learning and analytics so that clinicians can intervene at the right time, and you will have a population empowered to play an active role in their healthcare from an earlier point in the health journey. Ultimately this will keep people healthier, happier and ensure hospital care is reserved for those who need it most.

Orion Health’s Virtuoso Digital Front Door redefines the healthcare experience for consumers

Our Digital Front Door is a comprehensive consumer engagement solution that provides digital tools for people to interact with health and care organisations. It is a secure, open and scalable platform that enables organisations to bring new and existing patient engagement technologies together into a unified, user-friendly hub.

Best regarded as a strategic platform wrapping around all consumer-facing initiatives, a digital front door addresses fragmented consumer experience as a result of silos by providing a single hub through which all interactions can occur including symptom assessment, electronic referrals, patient access to complete medical records, virtual care and remote monitoring.