A digital front door is the website or app through which a patient of a large hospital group starts any contact with it: booking a visit, starting a video call or finding the nearest urgent-care clinic. It sends each patient to the right kind of care, and then to an open appointment. The term is used mainly in the United States, where the product is sold to health systems. A health system is a large group of hospitals and clinics under one owner, often with dozens of sites.
Why does a health system need one? A large health system may have 30 hospitals and clinics, hundreds of doctors and several kinds of care. These include family doctors, specialists, urgent-care clinics, emergency rooms and video visits. A patient with a problem does not know which of these to choose. If the patient picks the wrong one, two things can go wrong. The patient may use an emergency room for a sore throat, which costs a lot. Or the patient may give up and go to another hospital group.
Consider a father in Minnesota whose seven-year-old son has had a fever and an earache since the morning. At 6 p.m., he opens the health system's app. It asks him a few questions: the child's age, the symptoms, and whether the child is breathing normally. Based on his answers, it rules out the emergency room. It shows him three choices: a video visit in 20 minutes, a nearby urgent-care clinic with a 40-minute wait, or a slot with a children's doctor the next morning. He chooses the urgent-care clinic and reserves a place in its queue.
To show those choices, the front door must read the open slots and the waiting times as they change. It reads them from the group's hospital EHR and its scheduling systems. Once he picks a slot, the front door books it through patient scheduling and intake software. If he had chosen the video visit, it would have started a call in a telemedicine app.
The front door also needs to know who the patient is. A returning patient signs in, often from the patient portal. The front door can then show the patient's own doctor first, and fill in the patient's details.
How is a digital front door different from a doctor appointment booking app? A booking app lists doctors from many clinics, and they compete for the patient. A digital front door belongs to one health system. It sends patients only to that health system's own doctors and clinics, and it is built to keep the patient within that system.