K Health is a digital healthcare technology company whose virtual care solution remotely connects more than 3 million patients with licensed healthcare providers via leading health systems, insurers, and a direct-to-consumer mobile app. The company’s platform combines AI and predictive models with patient clinical data so physicians can optimize their diagnosis and treatment of patients — empowering them to offer high-quality care at scale and alleviate some of the demand that threatens to overwhelm traditional, in-person healthcare systems.
Problem: K Health needed to optimize its user experience to make it as easy as possible for patients to get the care they need.
As a healthcare technology company, K Health’s users present a unique challenge: they’re typically sick or managing a long-term health issue when they interact with the company’s platform for the first time. This makes having a fast and easy-to-navigate user experience critical.
“Our mission is to provide 24/7 access to high-quality medicine,” says Didi McDonald, K Health’s director of product management who is responsible for the patient experience. “To do that, we need to have a great user experience, or else folks aren’t going to be able to get to their visit to see a provider.”
Patient identity verification is an important part of that process — and must occur before treatment can begin. But however important IDV is from a regulatory and legal point of view, patients often see it as just one more roadblock standing between them and the care they’re looking for.
K Health knew that optimizing its verification processes wouldn’t just lead to a better user experience — it might even present an opportunity to provide a higher level of care to each patient.
“If you’re a patient of one of our partner health systems and have an existing medical record, we can conduct an EMR patient lookup once your identity is verified,” says Didi. “Meaning, we can grab all of the applicable medical history from the EMR if there is a match and pull it into our system. As a patient, you’re able to review your medical history and update it. This information is then passed along to your provider to review with you during your video visit.”
“That’s a really unique healthcare experience,” Didi adds.
Prior to effectively optimizing its verification process, its process had been largely manual. This is why the company set about evaluating identity solutions that could help it automate the IDV process and provide the required functionality.
Solution: K Health partners with Persona to automatically verify patients’ identities and facilitate EMR’s Patient Lookup feature.
With Persona, K Health leverages government ID verification and selfie verification to automate its patient IDV process and provide a next-level user experience.
“Before Persona, we would capture the user’s ID and selfie and upload both of them to our EHR system, where we’d manually verify it,” says Didi. “Persona has unlocked the ability for verification without human intervention every time. This creates a seamless experience for the user and reduces manual processes for our team.”
Other reasons K Health ultimately went with Persona include:
Persona’s OCR technology automatically extracts information from a user’s ID to unlock a better user experience.
When a user uploads their government ID as part of the verification process, Persona’s optical character recognition (OCR) technology automatically extracts certain information from the ID — including the user’s legal first and last name, date of birth, and address. This information can then be used to autopopulate the patient intake form, facilitating a more streamlined onboarding process.
This data extraction means the user experiences less redundancy because they no longer have to re-enter information already contained within their ID. The result is less friction and an improved user experience.
Likewise, the data extraction, paired with Persona’s automated verification, is what makes it possible for K Health to conduct the patient lookup within the EMR and pull in a user’s existing applicable medical history if there is a match.
“If we had our old system in place, we couldn’t do what we’re doing today with Persona,” says Didi. “We wouldn’t have the automatic verification and OCR technology to pull the information from the ID. It unlocks the ability to do a patient lookup in the EMR so that we can have a consistent and streamlined user experience with our health system partners.”
Persona securely handles PII.
Another key factor that led K Health to choose Persona over the other solutions was Persona’s approach to handling personally identifiable information (PII) and our HIPAA complaint solution. This was critical from a regulatory point of view because as a healthcare technology company, compliance with HIPAA is key.
Results: K Health is able to continuously iterate to provide the best possible experience to its end users.
By deploying Persona for patient verification, K Health was able to immediately improve its user experience.
Automated verification means faster patient onboarding; today, K Health is able to verify patients in an average of 2.5 minutes — with a success rate of over 96%. And OCR-powered data extraction means EMR lookups can happen in real time to pull in patient medical history — leading to better care for patients and a more efficient process for physicians.
But user experience optimization didn’t stop at implementation.
“We’ve worked really closely with the Persona team post-launch to continue improving our UX,” says Didi.
When K Health first launched Persona’s verification solution, for example, it realized that the instructions it displayed to users before initiating selfie verification weren’t as clear as they could’ve been. Users were sick — often in bed — and didn’t realize that they needed to be sitting up in order for an accurate selfie to be captured for verification.
“We worked really closely with the folks at Persona to make the necessary tweaks,” says Didi. “The team is so invested in getting us to a place that we are comfortable with. It’s been a wonderful experience.”
