Leveraging the Digital Front Door in Pediatric Care

By Matt Phillion

With Department of Health and Human Services cuts to key pediatric programs making headlines, pediatric programs are already seeing challenges like fewer community support opportunities, additional administrative burdens, and more families slipping through the cracks in their care journey. How can improving the “digital front door” for pediatric patients help ensure these patients get the care they need?

“Pediatricians have always been a safety net,” says Matthew Order, vice president of Business Development for Yosi Health. “When community programs begin to lose funding, that responsibility shifts back to pediatric practices.”

Already doing more with less, pediatricians are now faced with large shifts in the need for in-person care, without necessarily being reimbursed for that additional demand.

“Historically, pediatrics is one of the less-reimbursed specialties in the industry. The challenge now is maintaining high-quality care for patients who may need it more than ever” says Order.

The situation is worsening, he notes.

“We’re seeing worsening access at the front door, especially among more marginalized populations. As resources shift away, including services that provide language support, access becomes even more limited,” says Order.

Now, the industry needs to make sure pediatricians are armed with the ability to provide digital access for patients who may live further away, translation tools so that patients have a way to get the care they need and communicate.

“Practices still need to provide patients with the same tools they once accessed through community programs,” he says. “What we’re seeing is a compounding of existing pressures—administrative burden and the rising cost of care. Technology that once felt like convenience is now necessary to deliver care and ensure patients don’t fall through the cracks.”

The digital front door

When seeing a provider, the journey has traditionally begun at the front desk: You’re handed a clipboard with pages and pages to fill out to share your healthcare backstory.

“This creates real challenges. It takes time on the patient’s side, and that translates into additional workload for the staff,” says Order.

The digital front door concept enables the provider to engage with their patient from wherever the patient is comfortable.

“The digital front door extends that front desk to the patient’s home, making it easy to fill out forms, schedule appointments, and complete screenings before arriving, ushering them into that care environment in a way that makes sense to them,” says Order.

Healthcare has traditionally lagged behind other industries in some aspects of technology adoption. But Order points out that patients, as consumers, are accustomed to a digital front door everywhere else, communicating through text, chat, emails.

“By meeting patients where they are, you’re able to engage with them in their care more meaningfully and more easily. They can connect with preventive care rather than waiting until their condition worsens and requires an emergency department visit,” says Order. “You’re creating more touch points with care and enabling that connection without adding administrative burden.”

Think about the number of touchpoints in care: It’s not just primary care and specialists, but also, particularly with pediatrics, you have parents, guardians, and teachers who are all involved in some layer of care.

“By giving them digital collaboration tools, everyone is working from the same information and things that once took weeks can be handled much more quickly,” says Order.

Creating a better patient experience

Technology has a significant role in creating a better patient experience, Order explains.

“First you’re increasing engagement with digital tools that have existed for a long time but are now essential rather than optional,” he says. “It used to be a convenience to schedule your appointment online, but now practices are recognizing it as a necessity.”

There’s been a refocus on the provider side from all levels on addressing this core problem, says Order.

“From one-doctor practices to national care delivery models, there’s a growing need for partnership among providers supported by digital tools,” he says.

Order sees the next phase as including options like agentic AI and augmentations using AI chatbots to help with scheduling, engagement, and freeing up time for practitioners to work at the top of their license and focus on providing care.

AI is obviously a big player in the space right now, Order says, but he foresees its rapid expansion narrowing to technologies that clearly benefit the patient.

“You’ll see the use cases narrow, and vendors competing to show they’re delivering measurable benefits to patients and providers,” he says.

The technology is growing and applications are changing rapidly, opening up new opportunities to improve access to care.

“We have a significant amount of new data coming from AI,” says Order. “But it’s about making sure the broader technology environment keeps pace. Healthcare remains highly fragmented across different systems, and integration is still a challenge. We need unified workflows that bring all of those pieces together.”

Providers are in some ways being pushed into needing to be tech experts. Partnering with the right vendors and organizations can help alleviate this.

“We’re tackling this through partnerships,” says Order. “It’s not, ‘Here are your tools, go use them.’ It’s about showing how these tools integrate with what practices are already using and mapping the patient-provider flow. The question is how we ensure those tools work together in a meaningful way that makes sense for both patients and providers.”

It’s improving very rapidly, Order notes.

“Larger organizations are fortunate to have funding for IT teams and the technical expertise that makes full integration possible,” he says. “We’re focused on the core of integration—you have all this disparate information. The question is how it can be analyzed in a practical way. We want to deliver the right information to providers at the right place and time.”

With EMRs being the backbone of information in healthcare organizations, they can serve as the central hub for all of this integration.

“Providers are required to live and work within those systems, so it’s about enabling partners and organizations to deepen integration more seamlessly,” he says.

Meanwhile, for smaller providers, the rising connectivity in the healthcare space means there’s more opportunity for out-of-the-box deployment of technology that allows them to connect with a flip of a switch.

“We’re becoming less tech-focused and more operationally focused,” says Order. “It’s more user-friendly and you can engage with the digital front door without writing code. Instead, you adjust what you need through a control panel rather than relying on custom development as in the past.”

One of Yosi’s core tenets, he says, is ensuring patients have the best access to care and the best outcomes while providers can continue to do their jobs in a quality way regardless of how funding shifts.

“At the end of the day, it’s about how we use technology to bring patients and providers together more effectively at the moment of care, with less friction and fewer resources,” he says.

It’s about finding those moment when doctors and patients can meaningfully connect without anything getting in the way.

“The high-level goal is ensuring that all patients who need care have access to it, and that providers can deliver it in an environment that brings them back to that moment of care,” says Order. “We want to give providers that focused time with the patient, without worrying about administrative noise. Technology should wrap around and support both patients and providers.”

Matt Phillion is a freelance writer covering healthcare, cybersecurity, and more. He can be reached at matthew.phillion@gmail.com.