How Healthcare CRM Benefits Providers

Healthcare organizations are dedicated to providing excellent care for their patients and high-quality working conditions for their employees. Patients are looking for easy access to healthcare and personalized treatment, and medical professionals expect flexibility and an organized approach to internal processes from their managers.

A comprehensive CRM system offers exactly what both patients and hospitals are looking for. Though some view it as a sales and marketing tool and are cautious about appearing salesy, many healthcare organizations adopt it, recognizing the value. The global healthcare CRM market was valued at $8.8 billion in 2018 and is forecasted to reach $17.4 billion by 2023, according to MarketsAndMarkets.

Healthcare CRM: What’s Inside

Healthcare CRM is a customer relationship management system tailored specifically to the needs of healthcare organizations. Though its features can vary depending on the company, there are three basic capabilities that the majority of medical CRM systems share.

Patient management

CRM can acquire personal data across multiple sources, securely aggregate it to create personal profiles, and enable easy access to it for authorized personnel. Such profiles can be further used to enhance the patient experience by managing their prescriptions and appointments, sending reminders and follow-ups, and presenting them with personalized offers. It usually contains a communications module, so customer representatives or medical specialists can reach out to patients to welcome them, remind them about a needed procedure, get feedback, etc.

Reporting and analytics

CRM can become a big part of the company’s business intelligence setup. As it ties in data from all kinds of sources, it’s great for predicting patients’ behavioral patterns, spotting irregularities, and alerting personnel in real time. A good CRM should also be able to produce useful reports, for example, those organizing all open tasks throughout the organization or reflecting the conversion rates for different channels.

Interoperability

A cohesive software ecosystem simplifies collaboration and facilitates the flow of information. For this purpose, medical CRM can be integrated with other care applications. For example, data from wearables or smart medical devices (like a glucometer) can be automatically added to a patient’s medical history, while connected eRx applications can enable fast and easy prescription management from a single account.

Medical CRM Enhances Care

Nowadays, most companies follow a customer-centric approach, and medical care providers are no different. According to the studies by MGMA, 88% of healthcare industry leaders utilize automated appointment reminder systems, because patients expect doctors to send them reminders about medication intake and appointment scheduling. Patient-facing practices can employ healthcare CRM to get to know their patients more closely and interact with them accordingly: send happy birthday wishes, discounts on relevant medical treatments, reminders about medication intake, and newsletters with health tips relevant to particular conditions.

What most people also expect is 24/7 customer support. Customer care representatives cannot always be available but AI-powered chatbots, when they have access to patients’ profiles and conversation history, can satisfy most mundane requests and offer detailed information and reassurance.

Care should continue well after discharge. CRM can help automate post-discharge support to engage patients in monitoring their own health, remind them about follow-up appointments and medication intake, and educate them about the specifics of their condition. This can reduce the number of complications and readmissions, make patients feel in control, and improve their satisfaction.

Healthcare CRM Makes Marketing Smarter

One of the main goals of healthcare CRM is to keep current patients loyal while also attracting new ones.

Often people get “lost” during the referral process, while CRM tools can facilitate tracking and management of referral patients. If CRM detects that there is no input from the specialist (meaning the patient hasn’t arranged for an appointment), the tool will notify the healthcare facility to reach out to the patient and resume the interrupted care. The system can also track and alert about “no-shows” who book follow-up appointments or tests but skip them.

Healthcare CRM can automatically send post-appointment feedback surveys to patients and analyze the gathered data. This will help you evaluate the quality of your services and win dissatisfied patients back by taking appropriate and timely action.

A person’s demographics, interactions with the organization’s website and call centers, financial and other relevant details are aggregated to create a comprehensive profile that can then be used for highly targeted marketing campaigns and patient retention. It can identify new care opportunities that would benefit from particular healthcare services, separate targeted audiences into segments, and deliver relevant information to them.

Healthcare CRM Improves Internal Processes

It would be impossible to leave internal processes as is and still provide a superior patient experience. What’s great about medical CRM is that results are achieved through improving workflows and supporting employees in the first place.

Smooth communication and enhanced security

Poor communication between teams, organizations, and patients can lead to all kinds of problems: from appointment delays to medical mistakes and lawsuits. For example, doctors and nurses have to wait for a response from their colleagues for a long time when taking care of the referred cases, and patients have to re-fill their medical history time after time visiting different specialists or clinics. Then, there’s a security issue: without a centralized communication system, staff members resort to using personal devices for transferring data in ways that are not HIPAA-compliant.

Healthcare CRM software can provide all healthcare professionals with a centralized database and communication hub. Once information is stored there, it can be accessed by any authorized person: a medical practitioner, a customer support representative, a patient, or their relative. Call center staff have access to schedules and interaction history so they can easily manage an appointment or resolve minor issues, based on the patient's medical history and communication records. By using CRM for communication and record-keeping, healthcare professionals can protect data through encryption, multi-level authentication, digital signature, HIPAA-compliant storage, and more digital security mechanisms.

Automated billing and resource management

Healthcare CRM helps collect and update patients’ insurance and payment details for billing purposes. It can include analytical tools offering real-time payment tracking and allow the healthcare facility to schedule automatic reminders if the payment doesn’t get through on time.

CRM can also keep track of all medical devices that are in a patient’s or a facility’s use, and send notifications about scheduled maintenance or alerts in case of malfunction. This proves to be vital for people with implanted electronics like pacemakers, and for facilities with a lot of complex machinery that has to be frequently checked and tuned.

In Conclusion: Time to Invest in CRM

Medical CRM can help healthcare organizations better understand and serve their patients, reconnect with ‘lost’ patients, and attract new ones. Additionally, it can automate some of the important workflows, provide an easy and secure data exchange environment, and relieve staff from routine tasks, giving them more time to care for patients and grow professionally.

High-quality healthcare CRM is a complex system requiring time and budget to be implemented and extra time on organizing user training sessions. However, given the benefits mentioned in this article, it is worth the investment. To take the most advantage of this investment, it should be approached with a clear vision of the organization’s needs and goals.