COVID-19 Drives Self-Triage Solutions

Digital front-door strategies in healthcare were failing consumers before COVID-19. They didn’t address one of the biggest challenges: what to do if you start experiencing symptoms. Before the pandemic, consumers clocked over 1 billion searches for medical questions a day. Conversely, providers’ website and mobile app usage struggled. Only 37% of US online adults with health insurance reported visiting their healthcare provider’s website and just 16% reported using the mobile app, according to Forrester Analytics data. While some health systems and health insurance plans implemented self-triage solutions before COVID-19 to help consumers, adoption and deployment was limited to 7% according to a recent Forrester-HIMSS survey.

Enter COVID-19, and you will be hard pressed to find a health system that doesn’t have a COVID-19-specific symptom checker or self-triage tool on its website. We see these tools providing incredible value to those who previously struggled with a convoluted healthcare ecosystem. Self-triage solutions help both patients and members determine the best setting for care based on their symptoms and needs.

Healthcare organizations (HCOs) must now broaden their self-triage use cases, as patients and members alike report finding these tools helpful and want to use them for other symptoms. And to increase the return on their investments, healthcare organizations must increase the utility of these solutions by improving the user experience via design and integration with the existing tech stack.

To help our HCO clients optimize their self-triage tools, we’ve created a collection of Forrester’s research to read or watch. In this collection, you’ll learn more about how to optimize these solutions, not only during the pandemic but also beyond, so that you can capitalize on these investments and ensure that you achieve the greatest return on investment.

Not a Forrester client? Visit our COVID-19 hub for further insight on responding, managing, and leading during a pandemic.