Since its inception more than 60 years ago, Community Health Network, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit health system, has worked to stay true to its tagline: “Exceptional Care. Simply Delivered.”

A team of roughly 16,000 healthcare professionals shares in that mission by offering the full breadth of healthcare services with a particular focus on population health management. Spanning more than 200 care sites across the state, the organization unifies hundreds of physicians, specialty and acute care hospitals, surgery centers, home care services, behavioral health and employer health services.

THE PROBLEM

The rapid shift to consumer-centric care, spurred by the pandemic and the arrival of Big Tech, has created a competitive landscape in healthcare. Patients are becoming shoppers with greater choice in the marketplace, creating a novel sense of urgency to improve the way care is discovered and accessed.

"Patients expect access to care to be easy, personal and intuitive, and we recognized that our digital front door had to better meet consumer expectations," said Dr. Patrick McGill, executive vice president and chief transformation officer at Community Health Network. "Furthermore, an analysis of internal data showed a tremendous opportunity to meet consumers where they start their search for care and to optimize our experience to expand the markets and patients we serve.

"We found about 75% of consumers searching for on-demand primary care at one of our locations began their search on Google, while only 17% began their search via our website, where appointment searches and scheduling were the most digitally enabled," he continued.

To engage, reach and attract patients, Community Health needed to make access to care more searchable, discoverable and accessible for consumers online. Because consumers prioritize convenience and ease of use, any points of friction had to be removed to eliminate leakage and site abandonment to bolster acquisition.

"We also saw an opportunity to further enhance the virtual care experience to better serve patients," McGill noted. "So, we began to build a digital ecosystem to improve how customers discover, search and access care.

"It will be critical infrastructure – platforms that are easily integrated, intuitive and flexible – that will solve fundamental challenges like orchestrating supply and demand to deliver a customer-first experience."

Dr. Patrick McGill, Community Health Network

"We needed a solution to improve the reach and discoverability of our care services by merchandising services online, enhancing the front-end experience, while optimizing system capacity," he added. "This front- and back-end combination is what brought us to the vendor DexCare."

PROPOSAL

The vendor's team shared Community Health's understanding that access to care starts with a multimodal approach, and requires both increasing supply and creating demand to move the needle in a meaningful way. Upon assessing the vendor’s platform, and the areas of opportunity for Community Health, it quickly became clear to McGill that this vendor offered the right technology.

"The DexCare platform optimizes care discovery and access for patients while balancing system capacity," McGill explained. "The company offers a range of solutions that combine digital discovery, intelligent navigation and care merchandising capabilities – all the components we were looking for in our digital transformation journey.

"The ability to digitally merchandise care across services and modalities captured our interest," he continued. "And this newfound capability enables us to surface care intelligently to route patients to the best-fit options."

The vendor’s approach echoes retail best practices to deliver a “shoppable” experience that’s easy to navigate and that seeks the lowest-cost, highest-value care, he added.

"The front-end experience is fast on mobile devices, is promoted by Google to drive organic traffic, and reduces friction, to make finding and selecting care easy," he said. "When combined with capacity optimization, we knew that DexCare would be the vehicle to bring more patients into Community Health and enable us to deliver the exceptional, seamless care patients deserve."

MEETING THE CHALLENGE

Community Health Network implemented the technology to boost new patient acquisition, grow utilization of services, and provide the highest-quality care in the most efficient way possible. It first deployed the technology in the area where consumers have the highest expectations for a digital-first experience: on-demand care in virtual, retail, urgent and primary care settings.

"On the front end, DexCare optimized the ability for consumers to find and book care at a Community Health location," McGill said. "On our website, the technology powers our urgent care directory and care discovery experience. When a consumer chooses a specific location, DexCare’s Care Tiles technology eliminates steps to booking care and allows consumers to access real-time scheduling to find the care they are looking for, quickly.

"Additionally, our urgent care pages use fast page technology to expand reach and visibility in Google searches for care," he continued. "The technology serves as the connection between Google search and booking available care – like the OpenTable of healthcare, but armed with data intelligence and matching capabilities."

These capabilities enable the provider organization to engage consumers anywhere along their care journey and provide a new level of access to the health system, he added. Community Health has more patients who previously might have overlooked it, now finding it through Google, and scheduling care conveniently on the website, for higher acquisition.

"On the back end, the technology load-balances system capacity," McGill explained. "This frees up time for providers and care teams, and surfaces additional availability, giving consumers more options, choice and flexibility," McGill said. "DexCare works in harmony with the legacy systems we have in place. The platform fully integrates with our EHR to achieve consistency and interoperability for optimized efficiency, collaboration, visibility and ROI."

RESULTS

Community Health Network now provides a discoverable and unified digital experience that eliminates friction to increase patient acquisition.

"With DexCare, we’re automatically allocating and optimizing resource usage to best meet consumer demand and business goals," McGill reported. "Expanding our online presence and virtual care offerings has also increased access for patients in surrounding Indianapolis communities who are in need of care.

"As part of this initiative, we’ve measured significant growth," he continued. "Since implementing the technology in April 2021, we’ve saved 377 clinician visit hours annually because of our increased efficiency and utilization of virtual care services."

Further, the health system has achieved a 300% increase in virtual care capacity thanks to the technology's data intelligence and automatic optimization of resource usage, patient balancing and capacity management, he added.

"And on the patient acquisition front, we’ve seen a 12% boost in net-new patients acquired to the health system, and 30% of our patients are now returning for a retail or video visit within six months of their initial visit," he said.

ADVICE FOR OTHERS

"Health systems have no choice but to change the way care is discovered and accessed," McGill stated. "Consider what’s at stake: The demand for care grows while physicians and nurses remain in short supply. System capacity is available, but inaccessible due to a mismatch of how resources are deployed. And the emergence of Big Tech is poised to disrupt how consumers find and get care.

"Disparate point solutions are expensive, burdensome and foundationally incapable of solving a system’s access, capacity and patient acquisition challenges," he advised. "It will be critical infrastructure – platforms that are easily integrated, intuitive and flexible – that will solve fundamental challenges like orchestrating supply and demand to deliver a customer-first experience."

Access to care is mission-critical, and the solution is digital, he said. While the problems facing access to healthcare are complex, the solution doesn’t have to be, he concluded.

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