We wanted to provide a tactical overview of the key considerations that Product Owners should incorporate as they shape the onboarding experience of prospective and current patients. For Healthie users, we wanted to share how builders can leverage our API and SDKs to build a patient onboarding experience. 

‍

🙋The Onboarding Questionnaire is at the heart of driving a differentiated member experience in Next-Gen healthcare delivery. It is also an integral part of driving Clinical Excellence. Organizations have a variety of options as to what an Onboarding Questionnaire can fulfill. They can:

• Provide a fully async experience that is customized based on responses to the questionnaire
• Match the right provider (or care team) with the patient upon completion of questionnaire

‍

📈 Onboarding Questionnaires are often the first touchpoint with prospective patients, and Marketing and Operations teams can leverage drop-offs and data collected to continuously improve enrollment rates, matchmaking algorithms, and more. 

Key Filter Considerations:

There are a variety of filters that virtual-first care companies use to build an Onboarding Questionnaire, and as relevant to the Care Delivery Model, inform the algorithm of the Provider <> Patient matchmaking. 

Common filters/tags include:

• State (Healthie application: tie in Provider State)
• Specialty of Care (and can get more specific therein)
• Gender
• Insurance
• Desired start date (and matching that with Provider availability)
• Frequency of care desired
• Willingness to Pay (for Out-Of-Pocket Care)

👉 Note: For Organizations that use Healthie, we recommend leveraging Provider Tags as you build out your filters & criteria.

Key Design Considerations:

• 🛑 Reducing patient drop off: Ensure that if a patient stops halfway through your onboarding flow, answers submitted to date will show up in the interface (Healthie application: This is possible; create each question as its own ‘Form’); useful for team follow-up & retargeting 
• 📑 Implementing a right-sized Questionnaire length: Too long and you’ll experience a high member drop off before the matchmaking is complete; collect just the information you need for a Clinically Excellent Initial Matchmaking, and subsequently trigger additional Intake Flows be sent with the more detailed forms (e.g., the family history questionnaires)
• 🙋 Funneling Users to the correct End state: There are handful of typical “outcomes” following the completion of an onboarding questionnaire by a prospective patient:
  ‍
  - Receive an invite to your Member Portal, pre-loaded with Forms, Programs, Possible Care Team Members, etc (AKA, the first impression of your Differentiated Member Experience)
  ‍
  - Recommendations of 3-5 Providers that Patient Can then “Select” to book with, that match the Criteria Filters 
  ‍
  - Schedule a short (free) consultation with a member navigator (e.g., Embed Link with Free Consultation Appointment Type)
  ‍
  - For collaborative care organizations: Tying the initial visit to follow-up appointments and digital experiences based on the outcomes of that visit (E.g., leverage Provider and Client Tags)
  

Use Healthie’s API & SDKs to build your onboarding experience

Builders can use our API (Specifically, the Forms and Scheduling Sections) to build out a custom onboarding experience. There are infinite permutations of what the onboarding questionnaire can look like, so of course application of the tips that are presented below will depend a lot on your specific use case. 

‍

Reference materials: 

• Healthie’s Forms and Scheduling SDKs
• Healthie’s API Docs

Example instructions: 

Here is (a high level) overview of how you can set this up in Healthie

• 👷 Build an Intake Form with your Question(s)
  
  *Note: In Custom Onboarding Flows, we commonly see creating multiple intake forms, one for each “page” of your sequence, to have one question on one intake form.

• ✅ Leverage these instructions to create a filled out form leveraging your own front-end.
  ‍

• 📅 Optional: Pull the specific Embed Links and/or Self-scheduling logic you’d like to implement, if you’d like patients to purchase a package and/or book an appointment as an “End State”. Of course, you can additionally add different permeations of the Scheduling dynamically, based on a patient’s response to a question.
  

You can also use an external tool like Typeform, Jotform, or Formsort. When companies do this, they can push responses (instructions here) into the Healthie interface for providers to view answers in the UI, and to help-prefill the Patient Profile. We recommend ensuring that your onboarding experience is HIPAA-compliant. 
‍

❤️ Robust matchmaking is at the heart of what will drive a differentiated member experience, and ultimately lead to outsized success of Next Gen care delivery companies. Across Healthcare, but particularly in Specialties like Behavioral Health, Women’s Health, and Nutritional Care, this initial matchmaking contributes to reduced access to important care delivery.

Clinical intake will continue to play a greater role in the healthcare experience, as chatbots and algorithms can further enhance the matching and onboarding capabilities of care delivery orgs.