The digital front door. It’s talked about a lot, and with good reason: just like the actual front door of a home or business, the digital front door plays a large part in first impressions of web visitors to your site. So how do you get your digital front door to fulfill the digital experience for your visitors? 

These 5 practices will help improve your digital front door:

• Get buy-in from all the stakeholders – and don’t forget the clinicians! While development or redesign of your digital front door may be led by the marketing team or the IT department, the final product does not belong to just that group. Marketing, IT and clinical functions must work jointly to provide the most comprehensive, patient-centric experience that also aligns with organizational goals and strategies. While the voice of providers is important when developing safe access and appointment criteria, total leadership will be needed to guide clinicians to a unified clinical standard rather than having separate clinical standards per provider or service line.
• Develop a collaborative process of governance. For the best result, all involved teams should work together – providers, call/contact/access center, operations, marketing, IT and others. On the provider side, it’s helpful to establish a physician/provider champion who can work on understanding and buy-in with other providers, plus provide a voice for the providers.
• Recognize investment cost, both time and money. Not only will your digital front door not be built overnight, it will also require maintenance and adjustments over time. This needs to be taken into consideration in the overall planning.
• Improvement is a continuous concern. Once your front door is launched, you can’t sit back and rest on your laurels. Monitor and measure performance and look for ways to improve your visitors’ experience.
• Don’t delay because of overwhelming project specs. This project can easily be overwhelming in scope. Rather than trying to tackle everything all at once, pick a particular process, like perhaps a pain point that has been obvious for a while, and start with it.