Transforming the Patient Entry Experience with a Digital-First Front Door to Care

The Challenge

Friction at the First Point of Care

As UH Ventures expanded its specialty outpatient footprint, front-desk teams were tasked with managing scheduling, check-ins, health forms, and visitor tracking through largely manual and disconnected workflows.

Patients routinely completed paperwork upon arrival, repeated the same information across systems, and experienced long queues during peak hours. Staff spent a disproportionate amount of time on administrative tasks instead of supporting patients and clinicians.

From a business perspective, these inefficiencies constrained UH Ventures’ ability to scale access, maintain consistent patient experiences across locations, and protect staff well-being as volumes continued to rise.

Why change now: Without modernizing patient entry, further growth would have amplified wait times, staff burnout, and operational inconsistency, directly impacting patient satisfaction and care access.

Business Objectives

UH Ventures defined clear objectives centered on experience, efficiency, and scalability:

• Digitize patient registration and check-in end to end
• Enable patients to complete intake steps remotely, prior to arrival
• Reduce front-desk administrative workload during peak hours
• Ensure real-time, secure integration with EPIC
• Meet enterprise security, privacy, and healthcare compliance standards
• Deploy rapidly without disrupting ongoing care delivery

The Solution

Building a Unified Digital Front Door

To address these challenges without disrupting daily operations, UH Ventures partnered with Damco Solutions to design and implement a unified digital patient access platform aligned to outpatient workflows and long-term growth plans.

Clinical, operational, and IT teams collaborated closely to ensure the solution reflected real-world front-desk conditions, patient behaviors, and EPIC integration requirements. This ensured the platform addressed not only technical gaps, but also operational realities at the point of care.

Key Capabilities Developed and What They Enabled

• Mobile appointment scheduling and self-service check-in Reduced on-site congestion and accelerated patient throughput during peak hours.
• Digital completion of health forms prior to arrival Shortened intake time, improved data accuracy, and enhanced clinical readiness.
• Automated visitor sign-in and tracking Streamlined visitor management while improving compliance with facility policies.
• Real-time EPIC integration Ensured patient data remained synchronized, secure, and immediately available to care teams.
• Risk-based operational prioritization Patient flow and front-desk workload were dynamically prioritized based on appointment type, arrival volume, clinical urgency, and historical bottlenecks—ensuring staff attention was focused where delays had the greatest operational and patient impact.
• SMS reminders and updates powered by Twilio Reduced missed appointments and improved patient communication and engagement.
• Contactless entry features, including facial recognition Enhanced safety, speed, and convenience at the point of entry.
• Operational dashboards and reporting Provided leadership with real-time visibility into patient flow, wait times, and performance trends across locations.

The platform was deployed rapidly using AI-powered accelerators, enabling UH Ventures to modernize patient access with minimal operational risk and no disruption to ongoing care delivery.

Business Impact

Within months of go-live, UH Ventures realized measurable improvements across operations, experience, and scalability. Each of these was directly tied to specific digital front door capabilities.

• Mobile self-service check-in and contactless entry enabled 22% reduction in patient wait times, supporting increased patient throughput and enabling higher visit volumes without adding front-desk staff, directly supporting outpatient growth while controlling operating costs.
• Digital completion of health forms before arrival with real-time EPIC integration drove 20% faster health assessment completion, improving clinical readiness and reducing downstream delays, allowing care teams to spend more time on patient care rather than administrative reconciliation.
• The unified digital patient access experience led to ~19% increase in patient satisfaction, strengthening patient engagement and trust, improving experience consistency across locations, and reinforcing UH Ventures’ reputation for accessible, modern care.
• Automated workflows, risk-based operational prioritization, and visitor management resulted in a significant reduction in front-desk administrative workload, lowering staff burnout, improving workforce sustainability, and enabling front-desk teams to focus on higher-value patient support activities.
• Enterprise-grade security and real-time EPIC synchronization also enabled safe and compliant operations, protecting patient data, meeting regulatory and governance requirements, and creating a scalable foundation for continued outpatient expansion without introducing operational risk.

Together, these outcomes strengthened UH Ventures’ ability to scale specialty outpatient care while maintaining quality, efficiency, and patient trust.

Client Video Testimonial

Camera on UH Ventures operations or clinical leader.

“As outpatient volumes continued to grow, traditional front-desk processes were no longer sustainable. By introducing a digital-first patient access experience, wait times were reduced, intake became faster, and our staff could focus more on supporting patients.

The impact has been measurable across operations, patient satisfaction, and our ability to scale care delivery.”

The Bottom Line

This initiative removed friction from the patient’s first interaction with care while creating a scalable, future-ready access model.

Today, the digital front door enables UH Ventures to:

• Deliver consistent patient experiences across locations
• Improve operational efficiency as volumes grow
• Better support front-desk and clinical teams
• Build a strong foundation for continued innovation in patient access and engagement