The rapid push to digitalization and consumerization in healthcare means providing a seamless experience for patients across in-person, phone and online contacts.

The financial and commercial sectors figured out long ago how to manage huge volumes of confidential customer data and provide a seamless experience across phone, online and in-person contacts.

Christen Castellano, vice president of customer experience channels at Banner Health, is tasked with making it easier to receive care for their hundreds of thousands of patients. She is scheduled to speak about her work at HIMSS21.

Castellano is leading the development and rollout of a digital health transformation initiative to deliver a modern, enterprise-wide platform to patients and physicians through a digital front door.

"The intention improves access to care and improves convenience for customers and for team members," she said. "By making it easy to find a doctor and schedule online, we’ve substantially improved both."

She noted research firm Gartner ranked Banner Health seventh in ease of use and the health system has seen a 92% increase in appointments booked online over the last year.

"The increase in self-service appointment scheduling also allows more capacity for populations, such as seniors and the underserved, to access person-assisted appointments by phone, so the lift is across both channels," she said.

Because all health systems have electronic health records that hold hundreds of information fields for each patient, the most important decision to be made is how much of the EHR data is "just enough" to deliver personalized communications without compromising privacy.

At Banner, each patient has more than 1,000 fields in their EHR, she said, but they only feed 14 of those into their customer database and then enrich it with geo demographics and transaction data.

She noted the biggest interoperability challenge typically relates to the company’s middleware and how it subscribes and publishes data to its legacy systems and other applications.

"Our approach is similar to the financial industry, which also has confidential and highly regulated data," said Castellano. "Customers expect and deserve a frictionless experience in all industries, including healthcare, so we’re creating digital environments to meet people where they are."

She said the aim is to serve multiple stakeholders across multiple channels. As a result, the transformation has shaped both Banner’s organic and inorganic growth strategies.

"It is also foundational to retention and engagement for both customers and staff, which are critical to successfully executing our growth plans," she said. "A robust enterprise-wide digital platform brings convenience and connection at scale for patients and team members."

Christen Castellano will share some digital front door best practices during her HIMSS21 session, "Creating a Seamless Customer Healthcare Experience Through Digital Transformation." It's scheduled for Tuesday, August 10, from 4:15 p.m.-5:15 p.m., in room Murano 3201A.

Nathan Eddy is a healthcare and technology freelancer based in Berlin.
Email the writer: nathaneddy@gmail.com
Twitter: @dropdeaded209