Leveraging Kyruus Connect to Create Better Digital Patient Experiences on Your Website

November 04, 2024
Performance / User Experience (UX)

With over a decade of experience helping hospitals and health systems optimize their digital presence, we’ve walked clients through evaluating technology solutions that improve the patient experience — an integral piece of the puzzle.

While we take a platform-agnostic approach to making recommendations that match individual client needs, we increasingly work with Kyruus, one of the top healthcare access platforms on the market (and for good reason). Kyruus Connect acts as a “digital front door” for healthcare providers to solve what company co-founder and Chief Product Officer Julie Yoo calls the “patient access paradox.”

In short, this means the platform empowers providers to efficiently guide and match patients to the right types of care by facilitating important steps like provider search, cost estimating, and online scheduling — in addition to handling internal administrative tasks like digital patient intake, data management, and regulatory compliance.

Let’s take a look at one of our recent Kyruus implementations.

Temple Health

The Find a Doctor search feature we created allows patients to:

  • Quickly make online appointment requests and access/submit key forms within a private, HIPAA-compliant infrastructure
  • Easily search medical team listing pages that are dynamically populated from an existing doctor database, grouped under relevant and easy-to-understand hierarchies
  • Access and use third-party patient-provider matching, scheduling, and doctor-rating systems
  • Explore a comprehensive Locations page to find detailed information on related hospital, primary care, and satellite offices

How Does Kyruus Perform Out of the Box — and Where Does It Need Customization?

While the drop-in version of the platform earns high marks for its robust services, scalability, ease of integration, and overall functionality and performance — with standout performance in clinical keyword matching and SEO support — some users need further customization and direct integration with their website (Source: Gartner).

Here are some takeaways from our own experience, including challenges we’ve faced, solutions we’ve adopted, and recommendations for making this strong platform even better.

Challenge 1

Within the Kyruus infrastructure, a variety of text/category labels, buttons, icons, and other elements are static with no allowance for edits or updates.

SOLUTION:

With some additional development effort, you can utilize custom fields to merge with the attributes so they display on the website how you want or need them to.

 

Kyruus Connect out of the box on left, and customized for Temple Health on right

Challenge 2

You may find that the standard drop-in field options for items like provider and location information don’t meet your organization’s more nuanced needs.

SOLUTION:

Once again, with dev intervention, new custom fields can be added. For example, you may want to add a new custom field for healthcare provider logos or professional distinctions. In Kyruus, that field data would be stored as a text string, which can be mapped to the corresponding media image name in your CMS.

Challenge 3

Accurately migrating provider and location data into Kyruus can be very time-intensive.

SOLUTION:

Dedicating the appropriate team members to support the effort and utilizing a collaborative content tracking tool like Airtable, Asana, or even Google Sheets will help ensure that content is properly and efficiently mapped and migrated.

Challenge 4

Some Kyruus API integrations are more complex and time-consuming than others.

SOLUTION:

It goes without saying that this challenge is not unique to Kyruus. The level of complexity for your implementation will be determined by your organization’s current CMS and your specific platform functionality and customization needs. Kyruus offers a comprehensive documentation site that allows your dev team to reference the appropriate API calls and determine the best course of action to optimize the solution for you.

Need help with understanding Kyruus Connect or leveraging it to meet your hospital or health system’s digital UX needs? Reach out.