How your digital front door can improve patient-provider relationships

Searching for a New Provider is a Universal Experience

The relationship between a patient and their healthcare provider is highly personal, and once it is firmly established is based on great levels of trust. However, life happens.

People move to different areas of the country, providers change practices or make career transitions, and in turn, those valuable relationships may be left broken or discontinued. This leaves a patient to seek out a new provider, someone they feel like they can entrust with their most valuable asset … their health.

Here are the five ways patients traditionally find new providers:  

1. Word-of-mouth recommendations from family & friends
2. Seek appointments at convenient locations near home or work
3. Advertising awareness and recall
4. Search provider directories on health network websites
5. Window shop through doctor review sites

While these options have merit and can provide some information about the provider, that information is only useful if the patient knows what they want in their ideal provider -- and in most cases, they don’t.

Patients have traditionally not had high expectations when searching for a provider because health networks have focused more on promoting their providers and steering patients to anyone available instead of personalizing the search around patients.

Moving forward, the use of personalized contextual data will play a key role in patients discovering new providers and building stronger connections with them—and MD Matchup’s patient-focused digital front door experience is leading the way.

How Technology Personalizes the Find-a-Doc Experience

Apart from some rural and urban areas, the number of provider options from which to choose is not as big of an issue for patients [and the rapid adoption of telehealth has made it even less of an issue]. The real challenge is in determining which provider to select and technology can aid the patient in their decision-making process.

Presently, the criteria used by many to select a provider is mostly based upon the data they can find on the providers themselves. For example, if you use a standard Find-a-Doc tool on a health network website you can generally sort your search by:

• Specialty
• Provider Type
• Experience
• Quality
• Education
• Gender
• Location
• Languages Spoken
• Insurance (maybe)

Your current Find-a-Doc tool is likely a direct reflection of how your health network manages its provider data, not necessarily how patients think about their health care. So, while these are all valuable and objective data sets to lean into, they only represent a small part of the patient-provider equation.

Technology should be used to collect more contextual data from patients and providers, analyze their needs and preferences, and present a personally curated set of providers from which patients can choose.

Inspired by Relationship Apps

In our technology-driven world, it might be easier to meet your soulmate online than it is to find a new doctor.

Think about it: You’re single and looking for someone to date—potentially a life partner—so you head to one of the many relationship apps or dating websites. As you set up your profile, you input who you are, what you value, your preferences and habits, what hobbies you participate in, and all the characteristics that distinguish you as a unique person.

And then you press SUBMIT.

What do those apps do? They offer you search results in potential partners based on how you have described yourself and how they have described themselves.

So, as a patient, why couldn’t the process for finding a new provider work in a similar way?

Well, it can. And with MD MatchUp, it does.

How Patient-Provider Predictive Matching™ Works

While the intersection of technology and dating is nothing new, bringing that consumer-tested experience into healthcare is novel and needed. The quickest way to build great relationships is for two sides to establish trust based on common ground.

MD MatchUp is the matchmaking app for healthcare and can integrate with any health network’s website or app. Our goal is to help establish trust from the moment a healthcare consumer starts their provider search.

The first step in doing that meant we had to understand specific information regarding those asking for help (patients) and those offering help (providers). We do that by giving patients and providers an opportunity to tell us about their needs, personal preferences, expectations, and characteristics.

MD MatchUp’s proprietary process is called Patient-Provider Predictive Matching™ and uses a 10-point quiz and algorithm to give patients a curated list of best-matching providers who suit their personal criteria.

Until now, there hasn’t been an effective way for either party to ascertain if there is even the potential for a good fit prior to the first appointment. MD MatchUp has changed all that with its intuitive, personalized, and intelligent user experience.

Improving the Experience for Patients and Providers

In addition to the consumer quiz, MD MatchUp asks another set of questions to the providers within a network during the onboarding/product integration process. This enables us to gather pertinent information on who the providers are, how they practice, and the kinds of patients they hope to attract. MD MatchUp can utilize existing information in the provider database and supplement it with more specific questions needed to categorize and score providers.

Then, when a potential patient is on the health network’s website or app and searching for a new provider, they will be prompted to find their best match through the MD MatchUp quiz.

The quiz itself has different question types including Venn diagrams, sliding scales, as well as questions with multiple choice and check all that apply answers. These different question types allow us to gather granular, contextual data and establish a score for each patient according to our proprietary matching algorithm. [Note: to see the questions, see Bob’s contact info at the end to schedule a demo.]

From there, patients can expand or narrow their matches even further using filters like insurance, location, personal interests, and more.

Based on their preference at that point, the patient will be able to view the provider profile pages already existing on-site/on-app and schedule an appointment as they normally would.

The more personalized experience and inversion of the traditional Find-a-Doc process allows the patient to see their needs are being addressed right from the get-go, while the physician’s time is being respected because they are seeing more of the kinds of patients who fit the way they practice medicine.

How MD MatchUp is Different from Traditional Find-a-Doc

At the end of the day, traditional Find-a-Doc tools are very objective—they focus on a geographic location, a specialty or area of practice, maybe insurance, and that’s about it.

MD MatchUp uses all those things, too, but so much more. It’s a best-in-class next generation tool that understands people aren’t measured best in black and white, rather in shades of gray. So instead of relying only on objective measurements like traditional Find-a-Doc tools, we’re focused on including contextual measurement and display. It is a more dynamic and effective way to create personalized matches between patients and providers.

The Benefit to Health Networks

There’s no denying that health networks want to get new patients in the door—especially after the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that healthcare consumers are more anxious and stressed than ever before.

However, something can be said for not only getting a patient into the system, but also retaining them for the long haul because they are pleased with their provider from the beginning and are open to continuing the relationship because their provider “gets them.” When that happens, not only are patients and providers more satisfied with the experience, but the health network’s bottom line is also boosted.

At MD MatchUp, we ultimately believe that more intentional patient-provider connections lead to better outcomes, healthier communities, happier people, and improved efficiencies within the healthcare system.

Contact us to find out how we can help your health network acquire and retain patients, increase satisfaction, and report back an ROI.